If you’re sick of hearing the same irrelevant ads over and over on your streaming music service of choice, this news will be of interest to you.
Until now, The Echo Nest has largely applied its music data platform to helping developers build smarter music apps, but now it’s getting into the lucrative world of advertising with a product aimed at helping streaming services improve the targeting of their ads.
The Music Audience Understanding service allows streaming services and ad networks to draw on rich data about the kinds of people who listen to specific tracks. This includes age and gender; affinity to a range of 20 lifestyle categories such as pro sports or food; affinity for more than 700 musical genres and subgenres, and listening behavior such as an interest in mainstream tracks or new tracks.
The Echo Nest collects this data from the 400 applications that use its platform, with the company saying that it reaches 100 million users every month. It says that it collects the demographic and psychographic attributes in an anonymized form. Audio ad network TargetSpot has already signed up to use the new service.
To date, ads on streaming services haven’t been particularly well targeted. Music Audience Understanding should allow for far better accuracy than a traditional ‘spray and pray’ approach, and it could well lead to higher advertising revenues for the services – and fewer annoying ads for their users.
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