It’s a good day for artists on Pandora. Today, my Music Maker team at Pandora released an exciting new product called AMPcast where artists can record a message on their mobile phone and send it through their Pandora app directly to their fans. AMPcast is part of the Artist Marketing Platform (AMP) that our awesome team manages at Pandora.
AMPcast lets artists craft more spontaneous, timely, and fun messages. They can attach an image from their phone to their audio message and place it before or after a specific song if they choose. One of the coolest things about this feature is the personal context that artists are giving to their music. Hearing the story and meaning of their songs in their own voice makes me appreciate their music more.
Artists can also use AMPcast to easily promote whatever is important to them. Each message can have a CTA link to click through to a tour announcement, a specific show, a new release, a boxed set, a friend’s creative project, a personal/social/political cause, or just about anything they care about. Since these messages are authentic and coming directly from the artists, it doesn’t feel like an interruption or an ad, but rather an enhancement to the way I’m connecting to the artists’ music. The fan engagement of AMPcast artist messages are also off the charts – orders of magnitude on a completely different level than an ad with click-throughs as high as 18% for new music releases and close to 10% on tours and show announcements. See the press-release for more details. As artists capture their fans genuine interest with these messages, they will be able to materially impact their bottom line with this level of fan interest.
AMPcast is groundbreaking and unique to Pandora. It’s particularly exciting given the massive number of artist-to-fan connections in Pandora. There have been over 65 Billion Thumbs on songs from Pandora listeners to date, and each one is a preference statement that lets us target the right artist message to the most interested fan. More than 100M active listeners tune into their favorite stations on Pandora every quarter and most of them are in the US. What better time to speak to a fan than when they’re listening to your music? It’s all about intent and context. Given the magnitude of Pandora’s audience, it’s no exaggeration to say that we’re building the most powerful Artist Marketing Platform on the planet, and there’s much more to come.
Check out the video here for AMPcast below, and if you’re interested in trying it out when the Beta is more widely available, sign up here.
[…] info and best practices on the new AMP. Today also represents the general availability of our AMPcast product that puts the power of artist audio messages into the hands of all artists on Pandora via […]