When social media started being the main reason that people opened up their web browsers, the entirety of the internet became in some way socially integrated. Any publication, any brand website, and any company page have some trace of social linkage, and everything is now shared with everyone. One thing that was impacted tremendously by the outbreak of social media is music. The way people listen to music and share what they are listening to has changed immensely, and social music networks have become a valuable tool for marketers. Advertising with companies like Spotify or Pandora allows marketers to reach a huge audience. After all, is there really anyone in this world that does not like music?
Pandora has been among the top social music networks for years now, and with the end of 2012 recently passing us by, the company has released some statistics that show just how valuable social music networks can be for digital marketers.
From a Pandora blog post written last week;
The Pandora audience is large enough now to begin making a real difference in the lives of thousands of working artists. Your listening tells the whole story. In 2012:
• You listened to over 1 million different songs by over 100,000 different artists.
• Over 10,000 artists had more than 250,000 unique listeners.
• You created over 1.6 billion stations.
• You listened to over 13 billion hours of music.
With 13 billion hours of music for the year, marketers can be sure that Pandora is receiving quite a bit of traffic. The company’s active user count has steadily increased since the network’s beginnings all the way back in 2000. For 2012, 51 million active users were announced in March, and by the very end of December 2012, the active user count for Pandora reached upwards of 67.1 million. Compared to the same time in 2011, that is a 41% increase from the 47.6 million users of that time.
Although the company focuses a lot of its efforts toward helping out today’s musical artists, it still presents to the world some significant advertising opportunities. With Pandora and other internet radio or music sharing social networks, advertisers can find a type of advertising that cannot be found anywhere else on the web. Alongside the substantial display advertising opportunities that marketers can find with Pandora, there are also advertisements that involve simply audio clips. An audio ad plays every few songs, allowing advertisers to present Pandora listeners with a message, similar to an advertisement one would hear on FM radio.
Bringing radio advertising to the web has brought back the significance of audio advertising as a whole, as one can imagine the decline in popularity with these ads over the years. On their advertising page, Pandora describes how their network can help the marketing world in a video, quoted below.
“Your message is targeted by age, location and gender. Woven between songs, your message becomes part of the listener’s journey. Build awareness for a brand. Or prompt an immediate response. It’s a marketer’s dream; all eyes and ears on your brand.”
