How voice speakers like Amazon Echo are improving users' musical taste

Not only is voice proving to be an exciting testing ground for marketers, it turns out our little digital home assistants are making us more interesting music consumers. "I'm really excited about what's happening in voice and speaker technology because it's reintroducing the idea of music as a communal experience," says Universal Music Group's Barak Moffit in this episode of Ad Age Remotely, shot during Advertising Week. "What's interesting is that we're seeing that where voice speakers exist, we're starting to see eclectic taste in the living room." Moffitt is the executive VP of content strategies and partnerships at UMG, and something of a polymath: He's been a producer, a composer and a technologist. He oversaw the rebuilding of the legendary Capitol Studios in Hollywood. And now he's watching as voice-activated speakers are improving our collective taste in music. Editor's Picks Special Report: Advertising Week At Advertising Week, Publicis Groupe's Arthur Sadoun pressed on revenue decline How a rejected script for a biscuit ad changed Carol H. Williams' life Gary Vaynerchuk on why he (still) thinks it’s OK for creatives to work for free Marriott on sticking with Bonvoy through the scorn "Where voice speakers are used we see an increase in classics, an increase in jazz, an increase in classic rock and things that historically haven't performed as well in streaming services like urban and pop," he says. And a lot of this new discovery is being driven by a new kind of searching: people want music that fits a mood or an atmosphere, a fact that can offer marketers new insights into how to use data and metadata. "Discoverability is key and the root of that is metadata," says Moffitt. "Traditionally speaking, the metadata around music has just been the label copy—the copy printed on the vinyl sleeve. That's not necessarily sufficient to drive the kind of discovery that voice enables, which often comes with the form of mood or tempo or ensemble or genre. So we've been investing considerably in developing metadata practices, standards and the actual data itself to help drive discovery in most categories." Watch the video above for more.

How voice speakers like Amazon Echo are improving users' musical taste

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