• by Alex Weprin , January 29, 2019

Spotify is aiming to significantly expand its advertising business, leaning on its Spotify Ad Studio unit to build out its offerings.

Spotify Ad Studio launched in Sept. 2017 as a self-serve ad platform, designed to turbocharge the company’s free, ad-supported tier of service in English-speaking countries

The company now says it has “thousands of advertisers of all sizes,” laying out a few ways in which it hopes to further build out that ad business.

At the center of its advertising expansion is enhanced targeting. The company says it will be rolling out an expanded suite of targeting tools for both demographic targeting and interest-based targeting in the coming months.

The company also says it will be trialing an “audience upload” feature. It will work with a handful of select advertisers to test the solution, which will let advertisers upload their own audience data to reach known and prospective customers.

Spotify has quietly become one of the most powerful companies in audio marketing, driven by its vast scale of more than 100 million ad-supported users. The company has been slowly building out its self-serve and programmatic businesses, while trying to identify its most valuable real estate. 

It will be bringing sponsorships to its signature playlist offering earlier this month.

Enhanced targeting is seen as key to more efficiently automating the marketing process on the platform and getting more ads in front of the key listeners.