Editorial
The Gist
- Personalized music discovery. Spotify AI playlists teach us the value of hyper-personalization in customer experience.
- Anticipating Customer Needs. The use of AI to predict and cater to musical preferences highlights the importance of anticipating customer needs to enhance overall experience and loyalty.
- Innovative engagement strategies. Spotify’s approach with AI playlists demonstrates how innovative tools and features can create unique, memorable interactions, setting a high standard for customer engagement.
For the last year, my mornings have started the same way.
I wake up, without fail, around 6 a.m. I hop out of bed, grab my phone and look at my emails quickly, and then I start my day in the only way I know how.
I put on some music.
I typically start with some non-vocal, down tempo, soothing music. It helps me clear my mind as I look through emails and prepare for the day.
Around mid-day, I’m typically in the “heat of battle,” if you will, when it comes to my work. For this, I usually put on some higher tempo electronic music.
Once the workday is done, you can usually find me bumping some DJ Snake at the gym or playing rooftop soccer in downtown Austin. (Yes, rooftop soccer. It’s called Vanta; check it out.)
As you can tell, music is an important part of my life. It helps me be creative, it inspires me, it relaxes me after a stressful day, and it also helps me start my day. In fact, according to an AARP survey, people who listen to music generally experience lesser levels of depression and anxiety –- and hey, who isn’t looking for that, right? There’s nothing better than discovering a new band, a new DJ or a new musical vibe that tickles the senses in a way that soothes the day and your mood.
How Spotify AI Playlists Transformed the Music Experience
In September of 2023, the way we music-loving minions discovered new music changed forever. Enter, Spotify Daylists.
If you’re not familiar, Spotify introduced a new way to discover music through a curated list of tunes that changes throughout the day based upon your own listening history. As their press release describes it, “Throughout the day, your mood changes, and so does the music you listen to. Last night might have been a windows down, thrillwave Monday evening, while this moment is more of a ’90s rave rainforest late night. The point is, you’re ever-changing, and your playlists should be too.”
Well said, Spotify.
But as much as I’d like to sit here and talk about my favorite Spotify AI playlists like “Quiet Yoga Wednesday Morning” or “Light Chillwave Monday Afternoon,” this article is about much more than that.
Related Article: From Raw Data to Riches: Marketing Analytics With Generative AIHow Spotify AI Playlists Integrate Music and Technology
Through Spotify AI playlists, the brand has found a way to humanize AI in a way that does exactly what AI is intended to do — make our lives better and easier. Here’s how.
All human behavior on the Spotify app is captured, analyzed and curated through sophisticated AI to build out our own musical profiles and preferences, from the songs we like, to the songs with skip, to the songs we only listen to for 20 seconds. It also takes into consideration the songs we listen on repeat, the time of day we listen and what we listen to. Our entire behavior within the app helps build and curate exactly what we want to hear and when we want to hear it.
This is a very important notion. The world has had AI as the apple of their eye for quite some time, but Spotify is doing it right, and so can your brand.
How you might ask?
Simple — just do what Spotify does.
Mastering AI Like Spotify: Key Strategies and Insights
When looking at ways to incorporate AI into your brand's conversation with your customer, learn from Spotify AI playlists. You have to focus on three key areas: engagement, re-articulation and analysis.
First, you need to engage your customers. Just as Spotify has a vast set of users, so does your brand. Your job is to get customers engaged in the digital platforms where AI can live and learn about what is important to them as well as their behaviors and their mannerisms. Engagement must start with truly understanding your customers at their core.
Second, you need to re-articulate products or services that they may want, but don’t know they need. Spotify suggests new music genres to me all the time that I’ve never heard of, but most times I’m quite pleased with what they cue up for me in my daylist.
Your brand needs to do the same. Being proactive and predictive will drive conversion and loyalty amongst your customers. By introducing new products or elements that customers haven’t thought of, they become surprised and pleased with the experience in ways that offer up (you guessed it) Anthropomorphism. Hence, they create deeper, more emotionally engaging experiences for customers.
Finally, AI will analyze how customers are engaging with what your brand is planning for them, helping to make suggestions and pivots as AI learns more about each of your customers. This process takes time, but the more engagement you drive, the more AI will be able to better predict behaviors and future needs.
Technology exists to make this possible. Just look at Spotify. They get it. They are doing it, and you can, too.
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Remember, AI can and should make the world a more connected, conversational humanized place. It’s your brand's job to turn the dial up on the level of personalized experiences that can be created for your customers — or, as DJ snake and Lil Jon would so elegantly say, “turn down for what?”
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