While the service may be struggling when it comes to finances and leadership, Pandora is pushing ahead with its pioneering Artist Marketing Platform, which was one of the first services of its kind in the streaming music industry and which remains to this day an incredibly helpful tool for musicians at all points in their careers. While it seemed like a neat bonus that artists may or may not use when it was first announced, some time has passed, and based on the number of listeners the program is reaching, it’s safe to declare the venture something of a success.
The Artist Marketing Platform, or AMP for short, allows any artist with content available on Pandora to sift through the billions of points of metadata to find some real value in all that information, and the service delivers it in a way anybody could understand: visually. Bands and singers can learn quite a bit about who is listening to their music and where in charts, graphs and maps, and they can then use that information to make better decisions about where to advertise or tour.
About a year and a half after AMP first launched, Pandora expanded the effort to include AMPcast, which allowed any musician to record their own audio ads and then decide how much they wanted to invest in something of a DIY ad campaign, be it for a new song, an album or anything else they felt the need to promote. That is where AMP really hit its stride, as smaller acts are typically the ones that need the promotion the most, and thanks to that addition, Pandora has now proven just how much can be done in a relatively short period of time with its marketing arm.
Today, the powerful streaming radio giant has announced that AMP has now reached the one billion impressions milestone, meaning that the ads promoted through the program have now been heard one billion times. Pandora, of course, doesn’t have a billion users—it can now claim just under 90 million people actively using the site—so many listeners are hearing several ads throughout their experience. That's not an issue for many of them, as they are used to being delivered advertisements, so why shouldn't they be from the musician who just played?
In addition to revealing the number of impressions AMP has been able to accrue, Pandora has also announced a number of new features that will now be widely available to those using the valuable marketing tools. These new features will make it even easier to push a new single (“Promote Single”) or sell a ticket to an upcoming concert (“Promote Show”) with much more detailed options. The new Promote Show item can customize flight dates or ticket purchase links and geo-target messages, while Promote Single can seamlessly connect a pre-recorded audio message to a selected track, which may help audiences better understand its importance or relevance.
According to the company, only 11,000 artists are currently using AMP, and they have recorded and distributed 14,000 message, so those ads are being heard by many people, and perhaps many times over. That could make them effective, or perhaps annoying—a release from the company didn’t provide any specifics concerning how much its advertising program spurred revenue increases, but it’s not difficult to imagine many musicians benefitting from Pandora's sheer size and the scale it can offer, and with some shiny new features available, the number of acts utilizing what’s in front of them will hopefully continue to rise.
