How To Take Over An IKEA
Recently, Spotify partnered with Starbucks to stream music in the coffee shops. They allow the customers to save and like the songs being played and, by doing so, influence the tracks being streamed. But I think there might be a better way.
About a year ago, I was walking into an IKEA for the second or third time that day, and I heard the same music being played from the earlier visits. I began to wonder how many other people in the IKEA didn’t really care for the song I was hearing, and then I had the idea—
What if IKEA automatically knew the musical preferences of everyone in the store and used this information to determine which songs would be played? This sort of thing would be easy to do. Let’s use Spotify as an example. If I’ve allowed Spotify to know my location, and IKEA had partnered with Spotify, anytime I walked into an IKEA, my musical graph would ever so slightly affect the combined graph of everyone currently in the store who also uses Spotify, and all of us together would effortlessly control the store’s playlist.
When combined with some basic demographic information, any advertisements between songs would also be affected.
There’s a strong opportunity for Apple and Google themselves to be the ones partnered with by the restaurant and retail stores, but given Spotify’s recent moves, they might be more eager to gain a foothold.
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Potential Clients: Spotify, Pandora, Apple, Google, IKEA, Starbucks
Image Credit: Jer Thorpe