Can Spotify's Soundtrack Your Brand top the charts?

In an exclusive interview, Kehlan Kirwan talks with Ola Sars, CEO of Spotify’s new venture, Soundtrack Your Brand. Spotify is one of the world’s largest music streaming companies and had previously concentrate

Spotify is one of the world’s largest music streaming companies and had previously concentrate on the individual consumer market. Now they are working with some of the world’s largest brands to help produce the soundtrack for their brand.

What do you do at Soundtrack Your Brand?

Basically, we are Spotify for the B2B (business-to-business) market. We are the streaming service for the businesses just like Spotify, Deezer or iTunes. We are actually the first company bringing out up-to-date, progressive streaming services to the business market.

Be it the small café on the corner or the big name brand selling fashion or hamburgers, we have the solution for them.

Spotify is the co-founder of the company, so we’re the little brother or little daughter within the company. We are a separate company with a separate agenda, but we can collaborate the other side of the company if we need to.

Is there a science to getting the right kind of music for a store or brand?

Yes, there is science to it and it’s also connected to my life long quest for finding the right music for the right time and the right place. I’ve been trying to do that for most of my career, so now it’s about finding the right music, for the right time, for the right shop.

There is lots of research that have been done on how music affects the emotions of consumers. So, people are influenced by the music that they hear in the places they go. In the 1940s and ’50s, people started thinking about playing music in elevators and other high-stress environments. It has now become a strategic commercial asset for companies around the world.

It is part of the brand experience, the same experience that they want to deliver in-line with advertising or through their design. So music is a very important part of delivering that brand promise.

Up until now no one has been able to take a full on approach to that because nobody has had the system can deliver different shaded music across outlets around the world. So we’re the first system where you can do research on music effects on the brand experience.

How do you bring this offering to the market?

Although we are connected with Spotify we are also a startup. So we have the same complexities and problems that need to be solved as any other startup. For us, it’s all about building the right team, getting people who have experience in building a global brand.

Then in building a B2B brand it’s all about creating credibility around your product and the benefit your product can provide clients. During the last two years, we’ve been building what we subjectively believe is the best system in the market.

We have 25 engineers focused solely on the B2B market. No one in the global market has a size or depth of a team. So the belief has always been that if you frontload the company and get an investor to believe in the bigger potential and build the best product first.

That’s always step one. Once you’ve done that it’s always good to add some proof points onto the product. So we’ve been lucky enough to acquire some global brands as clients such as McDonalds in the early stages. We’ve also taken a market leading position in the Nordic market as well.

Step two will see us develop this into the SME market while continuing the drive with large global brands. Step three will see us distributing that message and creating interest around our story.

It’s not easy but it all starts with a proper product ambition in my opinion and if you don’t have the product, you don’t have anything.

You say you’re a startup which wants to be a global brand yourself, how do prepare for that kind of growth?

That’s a great question because I’ve done it a couple of times before and failed. So once again we go back to the product and being able to prepare your systems for growth.

In order to scale you need to minimise manual labour work, that’s basically the equation. For it’s about making sure the back-end systems are in place to do that. So not the front interface that people will see when they log in, that’s only about 20% of the makeup of it, but the other 80% that drives and powers it.

It’s about getting all of the supporting systems aligned and integrated so they can scale with minimised manual labour. That is the billion-dollar question in scalability.

The Nordic countries, where we’re based here in Sweden, have been a great testing ground for us and have allowed us to know the framework of what a much bigger scaling of the company would look like. There is, of course, an organisational aspect to this as well that is always super challenging.

How do you create an organisation that can grow and scale without the pain points that actually occur for some start-ups when they grow rapidly?

My school of thought would be that you need the person leading the right people. So we spend a lot of time on that approach. It’s no-brainer of course, but the most challenging part is always finding the right people.

With the right people, you can solve any problem, with the wrong people you create multiple problems from one person.

How do you determine which music is right for a company?

For the small business market, we will create readymade soundtracks for them. Obviously, being part of the Spotify family we know what music is trending in Ireland and where they trending.

We know what music is trending in Dublin as opposed to Belfast, for example. So there is the data layer which we are pre-packaging those tracks for people to deploy in their shops. It will be like a radio solution on steroids without commercials.

It’s a real-time solution for that café owner to be relevant to his consumer group.

Then, on the other side, we have the larger companies who are quite intense and more demanding in their unique brand sound. In those cases, we will sit down with the brand strategist or digital officer and do an interpretation of how the brand and brand interpretation.

So with a global brand it will be about defining how they will sound in Germany as opposed to the U.S. market. What are people listening to and what is their target market tuning in to.

Some brands want just single sound for all their stores globally. Others want to tap down into the local market and connect with their customers at that level.

I’ve always been a believer in the harmony between man and machine. So all these algorithmic approaches to music should always involve a human somewhere who can continuously fine tune and that last few layers of precision and quality.

We’ll use data and data-driven approaches to find the right music, but we’ll always have human quality in deploying and creating that strategy.