Finding That Music Lover Across the Web with bop.fm

The Publisher Spotlight is a series where we introduce premium publishers who are using Partner Connect to develop business relationships with relevant and interested advertisers. In this post, we spoke with Shehzad Daredia, co-founder and CEO of bop.fm, a music aggregator service that simplifies music discovery and playback across the web, about the unique qualities and benefits of targeting the bop.fm audience.

bop.fm makes it incredibly easy for music lovers to discover new music

bop.fm is a music service aggregator. We let people focus on the music they love, and not worry about where it comes from, by allowing them to connect their favorite music services into one unified interface. Listeners can connect subscription services like Spotify, Deezer, or Rdio; download stores like iTunes, Amazon, or Google Play; or even the unstructured, “free” services like YouTube and SoundCloud. Once they do so, we handle all the hard work of finding songs and ensuring playback. All the user has to do is search for a song and press play. With Bop, users can also build playlists and share songs with their friends, and it all happens seamlessly.

One really cool benefit is that since users can connect multiple music services within their bop.fm accounts, they can listen to artists and songs that may not be available through a particular streaming service. For example, someone might be a Spotify user, but have to open a different app to listen to artists like the Beatles or Taylor Swift, or maybe the latest Drake mixtape. But with Bop, they won’t need to worry about it, they simply pick the song they want to hear, and we’ll automatically find where it’s available.

bop.fm’s reach goes beyond its website

In addition to the bop.fm website, we syndicate our technology out to partners. These partners include major entertainment publishers like Billboard, artist websites like Arianna Grande, lyric sites like Rap Genius, music blogs like Complex, and even news outlets like Huffington Post.

We power playback for them, giving them a 3rd party player widget they can embed to their site to make it really easy to add music playback that’ll work for all their visitors, regardless of what music service they’re subscribed to.

We also have an iOS app that lets users do everything they can on the desktop – listen to songs, create playlists, connect music services – all on the go.

bop.fm’s audience is incredibly diverse and the data they capture comprehensive

We receive millions of visitors each month, and our user base is very diverse. They span a wide range of demographics, geographies, and genre interests. The tie that binds all our visitors is that they’re all music fans and pretty technologically savvy – we have a good distribution of visitors across desktop, phone, and tablet devices.
We collect data at a very granular level. We can capture audience data at the artist, genre, and even song level, and can pass all that data into the Marin Display platform. For the moment, we’ve built audiences at a higher level, by genre, but we’re starting to pass artist-level data through, too.

Additionally, one of the most unique aspects of our data is that we can detect which music service a user is subscribed to and allow advertisers to target that attribute. You won’t be able to find this elsewhere. So for example, if a brand is currently running advertising targeting Spotify users, they can extend that reach by finding that audience outside of the Spotify experience, and targeting them on the web and Facebook.

Why target bop.fm’s audience?

There are a lot of potential targeting applications for our audience.

One obvious type of advertiser is a company in the music industry, like a music festival looking to reach relevant audiences, or an artist or label trying to promote a new album. We’ve found that a lot of retail brands are interested in reaching our audience as well. Sometimes they see an overlap of a particular genre or artist and their own audience – for example, a jeans brand going after country music fans, or a footware/athletic apparel brand going after hip hop fans. Other times, they may be trying to take a more cultural or artistic approach to connecting with their audiences. The prototypical example would be if Pepsi does a big campaign with Beyonce, and they can easily reach Beyonce fans across the web through us.

What goals are you looking to achieve with Partner Connect?

This is a new concept for us, so we’re eager to see how brands can leverage the data we collect. We think there’s a ton of opportunities to leverage the data that we collect and make available for targeting within Partner Connect. Our goal is to get a better idea of demand, including the types of companies, the audiences they’re interested in, and the ways they’re using that data, to get a better idea of the overall revenue potential.

Interested in targeting bop.fm’s audience? Learn more about audience extension with Partner Connect!