For those not in the know . . . May the Fourth be with you! Ok , I’m going back to being an adult now. 🙂
STORM CLOUDS ON SOUNDEXCHANGE’S HORIZON?: SoundExchange, the clearinghouse used by the US Music Industry to collect audio streaming royalties, just reported its Q1’17 earnings. On the surface the story looks positive, as reported in this RAIN link. But there’s a significant change occurring within SE’s business model that’s being underreported here. Compared to Q1’16 SE’s revenue dropped 15% (from $189M to $162M), because Pandora shifted some of its royalty payments from the SoundExchange to pay the labels directly. While Pandora is still paying royalties through SE for music played on the free ad-supported side, royalties for music played on the “Plus” or “Premium” tiers are now covered under the label direct licensing deals. So it’s reasonable to expect SE’s revenue to continue to decline as listening on Pandora becomes more diversified across all three tiers. It’s also remarkable to see just how much of an impact Pandora has the music industry’s overall licensing structure, when one partial change from one streamer could swing overall payouts by 15%.
THE RELEVANCY OF DATA IN HEALTHCARE MARKETING: Staying on Pandora for a minute, check out the attached eHealthcare link. It’s one of the most comprehensive third party articles I’ve seen on the strengths and best practices of using a premium publisher (Pandora) to maximize ROAS in a specific category (Healthcare). Towards the end of the article there’s a fascinating real life illustration of how data can be used to serve contextually relevant ads to individual listeners. Keep in mind the “How Well Does Pandora Know Me?” example came from just one hour of listening. That’s quite a marketing punch to pack in 60 minutes for a healthcare client, or any other client for that matter. (Special kudos to Pandora’s Lee Ann Longinotti who’s featured/sourced in this piece.) Great stuff!
STARTING TO LOOK LIKE A “SNAPFAD”: Finally today, my DG spies have been hard at work uncovering a competitive sales piece about Snapchat. The sample size for this study seems legit with 3,000 adults surveyed. If these numbers are even close to accurate Snapchat has some trouble brewing. In particular, the stats about 80% of 18-24 yos always or often skipping the ads and 62% of users saying they’ll leave Snapchat for the next hot Social platform, are troubling. It paints a picture of Snapchat users being more concerned about social connections overall and less concerned about the platform they’re on. There’s also a little dig in the bottom right corner about 24% of Snapchat listeners still preferring Instagram, which comports with the user growth trends being reported for both companies right now. Can you picture a day when Snapchat is as dated an irrelevant as yesteryear publishers like Yahoo, AOL, etc.? I can.
Have a great Thursday guys!