I think you’ve noticed yourself how Spotify can target advertising based on precisely where you live as well as your sex, age and so on. Facebook has this incredible targeting ability too – although they’ve notably failed to get high quality advertisers using it it in my opinion.

Stations are going to need to capture this information to a greater extent because advertisers will demand it. Should a station ever be in a position to produce a unique tailored stream, then this is the sort of information it’ll want to know. Of course, providing that information will require the listener to receive something they want. And this doesn’t always work – look at some of those failed services which were going to offer free phone calls in exchange for targeted advertising.

It’s a fine line.

As more and more companies try to build databases based around their consumers, listeners, viewers or readers, people are going to get smarter. It might take a while, but they’ll have to.

We all know that having dozens – perhaps hundreds – of usernames and passwords is untenable.