Earlier this month Spotify made a pretty interesting new product announcement on Product Hunt, a new product to both view and share analytics on your listening habits. Rather than launching this on something like Spotify.com/analytics or as an internal product directly off their main site, they decided to launch the new offering on Spotify.me.

I think this is an interesting move for two reasons:
- It represents a new shift that I think we’re seeing from a number of innovative brands where they are sharing more and more data and analytics, usually leveraged by internal BI teams, directly with their customers
- It shows how brands are embracing domain name extensions like .ME for new products, in this case with a focus on something truly personal/personalized to the user which is why .ME is such a great fit for this specific product
So what kind of data does Spotify share with you about your listening habits? The Verge says it’s like a Spotify subscriber yearbook, except insane:
The report measures three different characteristics of music listening: Discovery, or how much people are looking for new music; Diversity, or the range of music people listen to; and Tilt, or how much people “curate” their music. Based on where they stand in these categories, users are then further broken down into specific types of listeners, like “Easy-Goers,” who stream music in the background, and “Eclectics” who don’t seem to have any specific taste in music. Each type of listener is paired with a seemingly random action they are “more likely” to do than the rest of the listeners. It’s like a Spotify subscriber yearbook, except insane. (Source – The Verge)

I can see more brands following suit here since companies like Netflix, Nest, and Tesla collect all kinds of really cool data about how people are using their product/service that would probably be pretty darn interesting to their users. It also feel like .ME is probably one of the best extensions out there for a product-specific URL which is something that I think we’re going to be seeing a lot more of in general.
Congrats to Spotify on the new product, they’re continuing to define themselves as innovators and I think this move is likely going to inspire other innovative brands to do something similar…or at least I hope it does!
