Democrat congressman Tim Ryan is one of the runners in the race to take on Donald Trump in the next US presidential election.
Not one of the front-runners, or even a mid-runner in fairness: he didn’t clear the bar of fundraising and polling to qualify for this week’s televised debate between candidates. However, Ryan is turning to unorthodox means to keep himself in the minds of voters: he’s released an album on Spotify.
Sadly it’s not a collection of deep-discofox crustpunk-catstep bangers, but rather an album of spoken-word tracks outlining his views on education, climate change, healthcare, gun control and immigration, among other topics.
“Tim Ryan Just Released an Album Because He Knows No One Listens to Him on TV” is how Esquire rather unkindly headlined its story on the album. Although given his stats – a week after the album’s release Ryan has just 1,175 monthly listeners on Spotify – at the time of writing Almost No One Listens to Him on Spotify either.
(And this is after a flurry of news stories about his Spotify album…)
Our more serious advice for politicians, given Spotify’s current direction, might be to focus more on podcasts to get their messages out: we wouldn’t be surprised to see politics play a major role in Spotify’s podcasting strategy in 2020: if only because there’ll be lots of campaign-advertising dollars swishing about in the US.
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