Amazon Steps Into the Streaming Music Era
I joined Amazon the first time in late 2013, six months before the launch of Amazon’s audio streaming product, Prime Music. Back then, the Amazon Music team was less than 40 people — now it’s many thousand. I joined in a Swiss Army knife content marketing role, overseeing social media, editorial, brand voice, UX, and marketing, all with the goal of driving increased product engagement and awareness of the Prime Music brand out into the industry and world. Previously, Amazon’s music CX was strictly transactional — buying CDs, vinyl, or digital downloads. Now we need to transform it into an engagement-driven UX across channels. My work ran the gamut — on social, I adopted and grew existing Facebook and Twitter channels; I launched and grew Amazon Music on Instagram and Snap; I launched a blog on Tumblr and integrated its content in the Prime Music app UX. I worked with music content creators, labels, and artist managers to secure increasing amounts of content for our channels. In less than two years, I grew social engagement by over 413%. I also launched Amazon Music Front Row, an intimate acoustic and interview series with artist who dropped into Amazon’s Seattle studio. Artists included Jason Isbell, Brandi Carlile, Sam Smith, Walk the Moon, and many others. And I worked with developers to create and test a new section of the Prime Music app, called Spotlight, to program this content — video, photos, text — into the UX to see if it drove increased product engagement. It did.
The team had a start up quality in those early years. I also wrote email newsletters, advertising copy, and worked to extend our brand across partner teams. When Alexa was launched in 2014, I immediately started to experiment with this as a new avenue for Amazon Music. I developed, launched, and managed "Song of the Day" and "Today in Music," the music team's first original Alexa content, and worked closely with the Alexa team to market music newly added to the Prime Music catalog, including our marketing blitz behind the arrival of The Beatles’ music. I also owned weekly music playlist, called "Prime Picks," based on the latest news from the music world, which drove more than 23M Prime Music product engagements.
All told, this was a fun and exciting time to test, learn, and apply insights in a rapidly growing, start-up atmosphere. Combined, these efforts helped transform Amazon's customer UX from transactional to engagement-driven, reaching tens of millions of customers.
I returned to Amazon Music in May 2023 in a Head of Creative Content role with the experimental business development team called the Audience Development Marketing team. I was tasked with working across teams to create, produce, and source content to leverage in cross-channel marketing campaigns, focusing on short form video to use across paid spends on social, in particular TikTok and Meta. This meant closely tracking the performance of 0:15-0:30 cuts of content created by partner teams, including Amazon Music City Sessions live concerts, Amazon Music Songline editorial and concert series, the Amazon Music Live concert series in partnership with Prime Video and the NFL, and others, including sports partnerships with Formula 1 and Overtime Elite.
Check out Amazon’s Song of the Day feature with Amazon Echo.
