Spotify, Riot Games New Partnership Enables Both To Go “Where Their Audiences Are”
BY ADAM GROSSMAN
Why would an audio company want to explore a partnership in a primarily visual medium? The announcement earlier this week that Spotify will become the official, exclusive “audio service provider” for Riot Games’ League of Legends (LoL) has led many in the industry to ask a version of this question.
Spotify and Riot Games have been growing quickly on their own for a while as new media platforms. Spotify has made several multimillion dollar acquisitions in podcasts (most notably The Ringer in sports) to augment its market-leading streaming music platform. Riot Games saw more than 100 million people watching the LoL World Championship in 2019 enabling the competition to become the “most popular esport.”
However, the companies seem to diverge on their core user experience. More specifically, esports’ rise in popularity, particularly with League of Legends, has come from concurrent viewership on streaming platforms such as Twitch. How does an audio company fit into a viewership experience?
Block Six Analytics (B6A) often receives similar questions to this one. More specifically, our current and potential clients ask how companies can most effectively determine and drive value from esports partnership investments. While esports does have unique content, competitions, and athletes (among other items), the fundamental driver for return on investment is how a partnership drives value.
One key value driver to consider is audience engagement. In particular, esports can help companies target audiences that typically differ from more traditional sports. In a past post, we used our Audience Inference Platform (AIP) to demonstrate how AT&T and Nike were likely using LoL to increase engagement and sentiment with younger, more diverse audiences.
Spotify’s own data augments the case we made for AT&T and Nike for how the audio company can obtain value through a sports partnership. Spotify’s global head of consumer and product marketing June Sauvaget said that “Gamers are soundtracking their experiences with audio tracks” and the numbers back her up claim. The official League of Legends hub for music on Spotify has 5 million monthly listeners.
Spotify’s user consumption data drove the company’s decision to engage in its “first global paid sponsorship deal.” In particular, Sauvaget stated that “our goal is to be where our audience is, and provide audio content that provides value to them.”
Spotify is not the only company following its audience. The Spotify / LoL partnership also builds on a trend that we examined in a recent post. More specifically, companies are increasingly helping the properties they partner with better reach their fans. As Sauvaget states, “There’s overlap between [gaming and music] audiences, but in the Venn diagram there’s white space on both sides.” One could argue that Spotify is “paying” for LoL to better engage with its audience and grow its esports competition.
Being “where our audience is” sounds like a familiar refrain heard by sponsorship industry veterans. The Spotify / LoL partnership, however, demonstrates something novel about this dynamic. It is critical for a company or property to use data to determine “where our audience is” particularly when it generates a non-intuitive insight such as that an audio company can better engage through video game activations.