How do you convince people that they don\u2019t need to own music anymore? That\u2019s a question that streaming music services have been struggling with for years. Both Spotify and Rdio have been ramping up their ad spending in recent months to attract more subscribers to their respective services — but they\u2019re doing it all wrong, says Rhapsody VP Product and Content Jon Maples.<\/p>\n
Rhapsody has been offering music subscriptions since 2001, much than any of its competitors, and Maples said in a blog post Monday<\/a> that the company has made many of the same mistakes that he believes Spotify and Rdio are repeating now. One lesson Rhapsody learned the hard way is that ads for a music subscription service should be about the service, not artists or emotional connections:<\/p>\n \u201cWe tried the emotional connection to music with our Droga5-produced bubbles ad early on. The ad featured a woman who dove off a building into a bubble that immersed her into music. She dove into another bubble, and the music changed. Nice idea. Hard to understand in terms of product. Or value proposition. Or pretty much anything outside of diving off high rises, which we neither condone nor recommend.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n In case you\u2019re curious, here is the Rhapsody ad in question:<\/p>\n \n