Advertisements interrupting your Listening?

When listening to music on an, ever so popular, music-streaming site such as Spotify or Pandora, the advertisements sure can get irritating. Listeners have been working on trying to find ways around having to listen to the advertisements. While advertisers have come up with some creative ways to make sure that their audiences have no other choice but to listen to the advertisements. You cannot forget about the advertisement for the online streaming website itself, they have also founds ways to incorporate advertisement into most things these days to get the word out about their program and fast. If that isn’t well thought out strategy, on both ends, I do not know what is.

Spotify and Pandora both offer free options of their services. However there is a catch: Advertisement. Advertising is Pandora’s only catch but Spotify only allows 6 months of unlimited listening and after that you are limited to 10 hours a month with a cap of 5 plays per unique track. However, according to the Los Angeles Times, just as of yesterday March 29, 2012, Spotify just lifted their limits, for the American users ONLY. Instead of only having 6 months of unlimited listening, we as Americans have an unlimited amount of listening from now on or until the terms change again.

Advertisements are not seen as a favorable thing to most audiences. Pandora and Spotify are aware of this and use that to their advantage. They strategically offer other levels, listed below, of services for a monthly fee and by paying for that upgrade you are able to listen to commercial free music.

http://www.spotify.com/us/get-spotify/overview/ vs http://www.pandora.com/#/account/upgrade

Are you willing to shell out the money for advertisement free music? If not, you can either just live with the advertisements or you can try to follow along with one of the several YouTube clips that instruct you on how to change your settings to automatically mute the advertisements when they start to play. After talking to a couple of my friends who use Spotify, they all had not heard of this change of setting ability. Between their responses and my research it does not seem as if this is a trend that is catching on or will catch on in the future.

Something that did catch the attention of my friends and has caused some irritation is what is being explained in the clip below.

 Clever, very clever.

Adding a feature to their website which causes the advertisement to pause when the volume is adjusted or muted definitely forces their audience to listen to the advertisements in full. They are now playing in full, whether you listen or not is a different story.  

Spotify, itself, is trying to benefit from advertisements too and has partnered up with Facebook for some help. Now when a friend of yours is listening to music with Spotify it shows up your news feed as shown in this screen shot.

Another clever advertisement move? With the large amount of Facebook users, I think so!