Spotify Goes Local

As radio listening has evolved over the past few years, so have the options to advertise to those listeners. Spotify is now the latest streaming music service allowing spot advertising on a local level, previously limiting local advertising to national advertisers.

Spotify is actually late to the game of offering local advertising. Pandora has been offering advertisers that option for years by segmenting advertising on a local basis either by market, demo, county and/or zip code.

There are plenty of listeners using streaming radio and advertisers have been anxious to tap into that market segment on a local level. Approximately 94 million Americans ages 12+ listen to all forms of streaming radio on a weekly basis, according to a 2014 survey by Edison Research. And audio streaming listening is predicted to grow by 40% between 2014 & 2017.

But traditional radio isn’t going anywhere. In fact, 93.7% of adults 18+ still listen to traditional radio in the Baltimore market on a weekly basis. This, according to Scarborough Research, compares to 26.7% of the market listening to Pandora, 10.1% of the market listening to iHeartRadio and 6.7% listening to Spotify. Except for those die-hard streaming listeners, many consumers listen to a combination of both.

So don’t be fooled into thinking that streaming radio has replaced traditional radio. In order to maximize the impact of any client’s radio campaign, a combination of streaming & traditional is becoming a necessity. Just treat Spotify or Pandora as another station in the mix. It’s an effective complement to a client’s radio buy and extends the overall reach of their target audience.