Brief:

• Spotify is giving fans of Sony Music Entertainment musical group Bring Me the Horizon a chance to buy T-shirts personalized based on their favorite songs from the U.K. rock band's sixth studio album, Amo, per an announcement shared with Mobile Marketer. After visiting the Amo in Colour microsite and agreeing to share their Spotify data with Sony, fans are asked to choose six tracks from the album.
• The site uses information from music intelligence platform The Echo Nest to analyze the characteristics of the songs, such as "loudness and energy," and to create a customized T-shirt design for purchase. Fans who don't have a Spotify account can manually select songs to create a shirt.
• The Amo in Colour website was developed by the band's label, RCA Records UK, Sony Music UK’s 4th Floor Creative and creative agency Phantom. The website's launch coincides with the announcement of Bring Me The Horizon's video for the song "In The Dark" and its involvement in the Hideo Kojima action game "Death Stranding."

Insight:

Spotify and RCA Records UK's customized T-shirt offering help fans of Bring Me The Horizon express their enthusiasm for the band by creating one-of-a-kind merchandise based on their individual musical tastes. Generation Z consumers generally want to be part of the product creation process, and are more willing than older groups to share suggestions on how to improve product design, according to the National Retail Federation.

Spotify's collaboration with Sony Music is a sign of the streaming platform's effort to beef up its marketing and merchandising efforts. Three years ago, the company partnered with Merchbar to give artists the ability to sell merchandise to fans through its platform. Music merchandise has become a big business, with worldwide retail sales of licensed goods based on music properties rising 4.5% to $3.48 billion in 2018 from the prior year, per Licensing International's Global Licensing Survey.

The personalization aspect also demonstrates the value that Spotify offers to advertisers. The streaming platform in August updated its self-serve advertising platform to help marketers reach target audiences based on their listening habits. Spotify Ad Studio's interest-based targeting lets brands reach Spotify Free users tailored to their individual podcast, playlist and audio preferences.

The biggest drawback to participating in the T-shirt offering is giving Sony Music so much control over a user's Spotify accounts. Spotify's disclosure page indicates that users give Sony the ability to "take actions on your behalf," including controlling the platform on their devices, adding and removing tracks from their libraries and managing who users follow on Spotify, among other demands. Sony also tracks playlists, listening habits and which artists Spotify users listen to. Spotify does give users a chance to remove Sony access to their accounts, but it's not clear what the company does with the data it scrapes from Spotify users after the personalized T-shirt is created.