SYDNEY: As music streaming services become more popular with millennials, data on listening habits could offer brands the key to deeper insights on mood, motivation and buying intention, according to a leading executive at Spotify.

Speaking at the recent Mumbrella 2016 event, Jeff Rossi, Global Director of Business Marketing at Spotify, encouraged brands to avoid making assumptions about millennials based on age and instead focus on behavioural insights that offer more effective targeting.

"There's so many nuances to who these people are and how they're connecting with each other, how they want to be connected with brands… Millennials are not identified by one cluster of traits," he said.

"Millennials are very important, but what is more important is understanding a mindset of human behaviour. For us, we see that the vertical line of 'leading edge' is actually we find more commonality sometimes, than horizontally by lineage," Rossi explained.

(For more, including how consumer data on listening habits could offer brands the key to deeper insights on mood and buying intention, read Warc's exclusive report: Rethinking millennial segmentation with music streaming data.)

According to Rossi, data collected by music streaming offers 15 times more data points than other media sources.

Music streaming data doesn't include demographic, gender or location bias and Rossi believes this flat data set offers advantages when it comes to segmentation.

"Music informs moods, mindsets, and tribes better than any other media source," he said.

Spotify users are much more likely to match their streaming habits with a certain time of day, or activities – and this is where brands have opportunities to match their advertising with certain activities, rather than under traditional umbrella segmentations, such as age group.

Brands are then able to identify the right context and timing for a message that ties in with the activity.

For example, a shower gel brand could target users streaming on weekdays before they head to work, because Spotify has more than 500,000 users listening to a “shower playlist” in the morning.

"That's how you can start thinking about reaching that same individual throughout different parts of their day,” Rossi said.

“That's how we can start understanding the segmentation of millennials – to really get back to really understanding what mindset they're in, what concepts we can deliver, and how you can start winning them as people."

Data sourced from Warc staff