Singer Paloma Faith Adds Premium Content to Her Branded Alexa Skill
British singer Paloma Faith’s Amazon Alexa skill ‘Paloma’s Bedtime’ now offers extra content for purchase. Sony Music UK and Faith made two new stories read by the singer available through Alexa’s in-skill purchasing (ISP) feature, a first for Sony Music.
Paloma Premium
Paloma’s Bedtime launched back in 2018 as a way for parents to help kids sleep. The skill comes with a mix of lullabies, stories, and messages from Faith, as well as 20 minutes of white noise. The new content includes two additional stories, The Three Little Pigs and The Tale of Mrs. Tiggy Winkle, which users can buy by asking Alexa and paying £1.99. Faith and Sony Music UK also expanded the free content on the skill with an hour-long version of Alice in Wonderland read by the singer.
“Following the success of Paloma’s Bedtime, we’re really excited to be bringing new content to the skill which we hope will continue to delight fans and offer parents continued support in sending their little ones off to sleep,” RCA Records UK, a subsidiary of Sony senior digital marketing manager Lauren Fitzgerald said in a statement.
Sold by Alexa
Premium content is a potential source of a lot of income for both developers and Amazon. Amazon takes a 30 percent cut of all purchases, and developers can track the sales rate of their products and adjust accordingly. Since starting the ISP program in the U.S. in 2017, Amazon has regularly updated and expanded the purchasing features and brought it to many new countries. On the setup side, Amazon has streamlined things for developers with upgrades liked integrating monetization into the skill development software.
Sony Music UK has experimented with Alexa as a marketing tool before as well. In late 2018, the company promoted a new Little Mix album release by releasing the Little Mix AAA Alexa skill. The skill shared background info on how the album was made, shared interviews with the band on the road and offered a quiz about the group. Then in September last year, the record label began running a series of daily quiz questions through Alexa called The Number One Fan skill, asking questions about artists signed to the label, starting with Tom Walker. Assuming the premium content is popular, it’s easy to imagine other artists following Faith’s lead and for her to continue building up the library of content in her app.
“I know too well how hard it can be being torn between work and kids or kids and other kids and so I’ve decided to take some of the strain off and read your kids bedtime stories to them for you,” Faith said in a statement. “Heck, I may even use it myself and sneak out for a wine, who knows! Anyway, hope it helps, love Paloma x.”
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