The Conservative Party are going to be using the new social media music phenomenon ‘Spotify’ to advertise in next year’s general election.
The reason why this is so exciting is that Spotify can target adverts at their database of users based on: age, gender and most importantly postcode location.
So, for example, if the Tories had research which showed that young women, living in a particular area, in a particular marginal constituency, were particularly receptive to messaging around crime – the Conservative machine would be able to serve up adverts that outlined their plans for the area with regards to law and order.
This sort of targeting is the utopia for any political campaign. And, as an added bonus, online advertising is virtually unregulated, quick to produce, easy to adapt and very cheap.
Spotify, which has 2.7 million users and has just been released as an application on the iPhone, provides users with free, instant and legal music from a massive library of songs. Every hour of music listened to, requires users to sit through roughly 3 minutes of adverts.
Whilst they don’t have a huge number of users, they’re currently growing by about 10, 000 every day and come general election time (given the speed of growth of other popular social media platforms) it would be unsurprising if they had 10 million users.
If I was planning a general election campaign, I’d be on the phone to Spotify tomorrow morning.
politicaladvertising.co.uk 
I agree that, because of the comparatively small number of users Spotify has, that the move by the Tories won’t have a huge impact on the election.
However, the fact they’re on Spotify at all is a huge step. It shows a great awareness of a strong digital strategy and also shows the Tories to be actively seeking the youth vote, which is great and a long time coming.
It’s great PR for the Tories whether it succeeds or not – really showing them as being ‘with it’ and also being the youthful party. A really good move.