Spotify Acquires MightyTV to Improve Ad Targeting (Mar 27, 2017)

When I saw some of the headlines about Spotify buying a company which is good at recommendations, I assumed that would be the focus of the acquisition, but it turns out that the focus is actually on improving Spotify’s ad targeting. So you won’t see better music recommendations, and if you’re a paid user you won’t see any change as a result of this buy at all. I was a Spotify subscriber for a time, but have never used the ad-based service, so I don’t know how the targeting is at this point, but if it’s anything like other online video and audio services, it could use some help, so this seems smart. But of course good targeting requires good data on users, and I’m curious to see how Spotify will improve in that department – by itself, it presumably knows relatively little about its users beyond their musical tastes, so better targeting would likely require buying in third party data to enhance its user profiles. And therein, of course, lies the inherent tension in all ad-based business models – user privacy versus effective targeting.

via Spotify

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• Spotify

• Advertising
• M&A
• Music

• Advertising Sustainability
• Streaming is Saving Music

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