New trends are always surrounding the Music industry, especially in the technology arena. A few weeks ago, for example, the “streaming” music service Spotify exceeded expectations with their launch in the United States. After its presentation on July 14, the music service surpassed 70,000 accounts in the first week, according to the prestigious music magazine Billboard.

With this data, Spotify, which has already more than 10 million users and over 1.6 million paying subscribers in Europe, broke records for registered users in a single week, beating other music services such as Rhapsody, Slacker Radio and Grooveshark.

Opportunity to Attract Latino Audiences
Spotify is moving into the U.S. market and one major opportunity for business is the Latino community. In fact, music is an important vehicle for any company that wants to reach the Latino community through digital media because Hispanics feel such a strong cultural attachment to music. They also tend to be early adopters of mobile communication technologies and social platforms. Latinos do not care about the platform or format as long as they can listen to their favorite artists anywhere.

Gustavo Razzeti explains in his article “The Latino Sound of Digital Music”, which also states that Latinos are leading the shift to listening to music online and on computers at a faster pace than the general population.

Even more, a Scarborough study found that 22 percent of Hispanic cellular users download or listen to music via their wireless device, versus 15 percent of all wireless users. In addition, 48% of Hispanics were the most likely to have used a music app recently compared to 42% of whites and 42% of African-Americans, according to Pew Institute.

Mobile applications have great potential to promote brand presence in a creative way.

Mobile music apps offer endless creative possibilities for advertisers to improve their brand presence among the Latino community. The possibilities include interactive banners in music applications where advertisers could promote a brand, product or service redirecting users to engaging videos or social media platforms.

Strategies like this one have already been used by Evian in Pandora’s iPhone app or by Coca Cola, which leads users to the mobile version of its Facebook Page through banners in the iPhone TV Guide app.

This post is also available in: Spanish