Spotify, Online Advertising and Aural Whiplash

So there I am, working away, with Spotify on playing some stuff I really like, when suddenly on comes this music track Ad - its totally different in style and volume, and is advertising a type of music I don't like. It totally jarred with the music of a few seconds before, the shock was visceral. I was incensed enough to Twitter:

Hey Spotify - inserting a few seconds of some random singer that totally jars with what I'm listening to at the time really doesn't work !

Which of course brought a few sensible replies on the lines of "buy the premium service", "turn it off until its over" etc. But there was one reply which I really had to blog about - David Jennings, fellow Tuttler and expert on all matters to do with online music, noted that:

I recorded the same thing ("audio whiplash" with ads) abt We7

We7 being a music service a few years ago (where are they now....). For those of you who don't know him, David wrote "Net, Blogs & Rock n Roll" which in my view is still the definitive guide to online music in the social media age - and other online media by inference. Anyone who fancies themselves a strategist or expert in this industry needs to read David's book.

What David wrote in his blog (also called Net, Blogs and Rock n Roll) about this issue, over here, in a piece entitled "Audio whiplash from personalised ads with free music downloads", was:

.....listen to that audio whiplash between the ad and the track itself. When you're listening to French chansons from the '20s and '30s, just the tone of the ad is enough to make it come across like an aural invasion, and thus counterproductive in getting across the message.

Given that my selection of tracks is probably a better guide to my personality, lifestyle and buying habits than my age and gender, why not tailor the ads to the music rather than the listener demographics? No need for the clever software (patent pending) then, but the 'creatives' at the ad agencies might have to work a bit harder to think about the context in which their work will be heard.

"Audio Whiplash" was exactly the right term. That shift in music really had impact, I felt mentally assaulted. I hated the advertised music and artist far more than I would have in a neutral environment, and I was incensed with Spotify for being so insensitive as to play it when I was listening to something so different, that I liked.

Its interesting to think about why I had this reaction. Music may have the charms to soothe the most savage breast, but it certainly works in reverse if its the wrong music. My initial hypothesis is that music reaches deep into us and bypasses some of our more rational functions, so that when it goes wrong, the reaction is far more visceral than even a popup Ad will cause.

In my view, any service that is dealing with music probably has to be far more careful to tailor the Ads to what the person is listening to, and as David notes, music selection is probably a far better guide to personality - and mood - than any blander demographics. Spotify and other music stations are in my view sitting on a goldmine of realtime user demographic data, but its clearly very early days in terms of using it. Considering David wrote his piece in 2007, its clear that there is still much to learn.

Or maybe its just me - others thoughts?