The Dublin-based digital sales agency Digitize has been appointed as the Irish sales partner for Spotify, the on-demand music streaming service.
Spotify is one of the fastest growing digital media properties in the world and has a catalogue of over 20m music tracks available for streaming. Over the past few years, the company has rolled out its product offering to 17 different markets around the world, including Ireland. The company has more than 20m active users, 5m of which are paying subscribers.
Spotify has been active in Ireland since November 2012, and has seen a great reaction to the service, both in terms of active users of the free, ad-supported service, and of the subscription service. Vodafone and Electric Ireland were Spotify’s exclusive advertising launch partners. Since last week, however, Spotify’s inventory has been opened up to all Irish advertisers.
With downloads of digital music from various platforms like iTunes and Amazon.com under pressure, the streaming music industry, which is dominated by players like Spotify and Pandora, has benefitted considerably over the past year. Paid-up or premium subscribers can listen to their choice of music uninterrupted by advertising. However advertising underpins the free-access part of the Spotify business model and forms an important part of the deal Spotify has in place with the various record labels. Since it was launched over 4 years ago, Spotify has paid over $600m to the record labels for the rights to play their catalogues. Analysts reckon that around 70% of all Spotify’s revenues go back to the record labels.
Digitize, which is headed up by John Patten, was established in 2008 and is one of the leading independent digital media sales houses in the Irish market, managing publishers such as Channel 4, IGN, Miniclip, Dailymotion & Stardoll. It also fully manages its own performance network, AdSure, in both the Irish & UK markets.
