Comments on: Spotify adverts

By: PKM

PKM — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 13:55:58 +0000

The thing that tipped me off to the voicemails definitely being fake are that I’ve started hearing ones I recognise (”the only thing is- you can’t put it on your iPod”, “if you could have a little bar at the bottom to see who added a track” and others) with exactly the same wording as previous ones but read by different voices. I guess they might transcribe and re-record voicemails to avoid legal issues with replaying people’s voices, but making them obviously fake like this feels disingenuous.

Still, I can’t complain about the service- the only thing that made me annoyed is pressing Mute while adverts are playing pauses the advert, but not while music is playing. It could have been a useful feature but it just feels like those unskippable piracy notices on DVDs.

By: Nonchalant

Nonchalant — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 09:23:12 +0000

The voicemail ones are the best! I love the Irish guy “There’s not enough dance music, so I urhhh can’t get my dancing shoes on!”. Brightens my day each time I hear it!

By: Frank The Spider

Frank The Spider — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 14:31:04 +0000

I work from home 3 days a week, and Spotify keeps me going. As long as they keep the adverts to ‘in between’ the tracks, I personally don’t mind the ‘voicemail’ slots - they make me laugh sometimes.

By: Adam

Adam — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 08:37:35 +0000

Hi Will - crikey, thanks for the rapid and unexpected response! Glad you found my comments useful.

I did some Googling and found there’s quite a lot of people who share my dislike of the adverts (the adverts themselves, not the fact that we have to put up with them). I kind of understand that you have to create a few ’sample’ voicemails to get the ball rolling so I may have been slightly harsh on that one. The Dave Berry ones really get me though - why oh why are they just so poor?! I really think an improvement to your adverts could make a massive difference to your brand image.

One suggestion from me would be to see if you can get any popular comedians/celebrities who have dropped slightly off the radar to do some ads. Either just the voiceovers or even writing them as well. You could draw them in with the incentive of huge exposure, hence no need to pay them big fees. Then, from the users’ point of view, the adverts might come across as less annoying/irritating and could even be quite enjoyable, depending on who the celebrity is!

Another suggestion for the functionality side of things would be to restrict the number of playlists for free accounts - I have an absolute bucketload and it struck me that having the number limited to maybe 10 or 20 would encourage me to upgrade, while still being pretty fair. Hope I don’t regret suggesting that…!

Anyway thanks for reading my post and I hope you find my suggestions useful.

By: Will

Will — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 02:08:55 +0000

Hey there, the adverts for the phoneline are indeed done inhouse, merely in this case to let everyone know about the phoneline and the kind of format your message is meant to have. The plan is to edit them to the intended length when they’re coming in.

Thanks for the input however! some interesting points. I’m tired of hearing about how people are pissed off about there being adverts, thats the business side of it! If there were no adverts we would have no income and the whole thing wouldn’t be possible. Look out for new voicemail ads soon