Top 5 Least Favourite Spotify Adverts
Sam Phillips, September 1st, 2009 10:50 pm
Even with the iPhone app, I’m not sold on Spotify Premium. £10 is too much. £5, I’d consider it, but £10 is too much when the music is never really mine. Fair play to the guys, though, the streaming quality is spot on, the cross-platform is impressive and the interface is so good that I often listen to music I have on iTunes, on my hard drive, on Spotify instead.
But £10 is too much, so for now I’m going to be listening to the following terrible adverts:
The Right Livelihood Award
I’ve never heard of this award, and I’m sure it’s all for a very good cause. But the advert is some shonky stuff. It starts with a vocal stumble when trying to say ‘Right Livelihood Award’ (never a good start to fluff the brand!), and then goes to tell me absolutely nothing about what the award is or does. But apparently there’s one thing I should remember – that we can all do something if we try hard enough, that wishing and dreaming make crazy things happen, and that you should never eat yellow snow. Or something like that – the point is, this ‘one’ thing I should remember is divided into three meaningless clichés, and there’s no chance I’m remembering them.
The whole thing sounds like it was recorded outside on a busy street. And still I’m none the wiser about what this doubtless very worthy award is for!
ShareMyPlaylist.com/ShareMyPlaylists.com
Nice idea; social playlists for spotify. Presumably a feature that spotify will make themselves eventually, but anyway, what I love about this advert is the girl talking gets the domain name wrong. It’s www.sharemyplaylists.com (playlists plural), but she twice calls it www.sharemyplaylist.com (playlist singular). The latter domain is a most certainly not a production ready website – in that it’s a file index with a couple of favicons and a robots.txt file. Fail!
Crucial Memory
Your computer has slowed down – do you need more memory, or just to be patronised by the ‘computer doctor’? Apparently, with crucial, both are possible. Joy.
This one seems to have buggered off for now, but it sure was odious when it was about – and for one 48 hour heavy work weekend it seemed to be the only advert available.
MTV safe sex ultra-liberal moralising
‘Everybody loves music… especially in the bedroom’. What?! I prefer music in my study. Or at my piano. Quite the impressive segue though. This MTV ad, featuring some beautiful Irish bird, suggests that I should refrain from unsafe sex and enjoy ’sexy playlists’ in the bedroom instead. Not entirely sure that this is the best way to reach ‘young people’.
That said, I still chuckle to myself when this ad comes on; just once I wish she’d say ‘Everybody loves sex… especially in the music room‘. Then I’d definitely never pay for the premium subscription.
Rhino Vinyl
‘Spotify is ace; streaming, high quality, distributed. At Rhino, we love it almost as much as vinyl records’. Say again?You like mp3s, but really you like vinyl and think mp3 is shit? Again, quite the segue and as the advert rolls on, it does seem to make sense. But I love the transition; it’s akin to local news shifting between a murder case and a human interest piece about puppies and their hilarious habits.
Other favourites include the advert for Scarlett Johansson’s single getting cut off half way through every single time, and Amy McDonald, who talks for what seems like hours about how, somewhere, live tracks and her whole album is available to listen. It might be on Spotify – it probably is – but she seems to neglect to mention it!
And just as I write, Adam from Spotify has used the Spotify recording microphone, bought for £7.99 at Argos, to record an ad telling me how good their ad targetting is. Touché!
