Week In Review: Spotify Launches A Documentary Series; Instagram Rips Off Snapchat Again
1. Spotify Launches A Documentary Series
Spotify continues their push into video with a documentary series about ‘80s metal band Metallica. It’s just one of several video properties Spotify is looking to push out this year as they continue to try and differentiate themselves from other music services.
Why It Matters
Spotify has around 30 million paying users, all of whom have downloaded the Spotify app. That makes them much more of a threat than upstarts like Vessel who need to build an audience from scratch.
Music and video go together like peanut butter and jelly and have been a staple since the early days of television. Other music services, Vevo, for instance, are looking to get into video as well, and live streaming has also proven to be fertile territory for music, with sites like live.ly attracting considerable interest.
While YouTube has become home for both official record-company sponsored videos and bootleg concert videos, music sites like Spotify have the best chance of providing YouTube with some real competition. The huge install base gives them a giant leg up and if they can follow through with content people actually want to watch, they’ll be well-positioned to take on YouTube.
What You Need To Do About It
If you’re a studio, you’ll want to think about music-related projects you can pitch to Spotify. If you’re a network you’ll want to do the same thing—either sell them some of the programming you own or maybe even co-produce something. If you’re an advertiser, you’ll want to take a look at what they are up to and see whether a sponsorship or even branded content of some sort makes sense for you and your brand.
2. Instagram Rips Off Snapchat Again
While social media gurus, pundits, sherpas and shamans are aghast over Instagram’s blatant co-opting of Snapchat’s “Stories” feature, it seems to be working pretty well: lots of people over the age of 25 seem to be making use of Instagram Stories, attracted by the novelty and the much-easier-to-use interface.
Building on Stories success, Instagram took on another popular Snapchat feature, Live Stories, this week, launching its own events video channels. Like Live Stories, said channels collect videos around live events and funnel them into a single stream. But Instagram goes even further, using the Magic Algorithm to tailor each stream to a user’s individual tastes.
Why It Matters
Instagram has around 300 million monthly average users. That’s twice as many as Snapchat has. What’s more, most of Instagram’s users have jobs and income, as opposed to Snapchat, many of whose users are still reliant on Mom and Dad.
Live Stories is a great idea and rather than cannibalize Snapchat, it’s far more likely that Instagram will simply give its own users yet another reason to use the site. For both platforms, Stories are a great way to increase stickiness and they create an additional venue for them to run advertising, native advertising in particular.
What You Need To Do About It
Live video is a great way to connect with users and both Snapchat and Instagram’s platforms are well designed for advertisers. That means whether you are a brand, a network or an MVPD, you should look into sponsoring or advertising on a feed and see about creating feeds for your own shows and brands.
TV[R]EV is written, curated and incubated by the BRaVe Ventures team. Find TV[R]EV on Facebook and Twitter, and sign up for the newsletter to stay up to date on the TV[R]EVOLUTION.
