Tinder and Spotify Hook Up, But Who REALLY Cares? (MTCH)

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Think of it as the solution to a problem that doesn’t exist. As of this week, Tinder — the online matchmaking service from Match Group Inc (NASDAQ:MTCH) — will allow its members to share their Spotify music library’s contents with other Tinder users as a means of helping to determine compatibility.

Match Group: Tinder and Spotify Hook Up, But Who Cares? (MTCH)A gimmick? Sure, but given the entire premise of Tinder, it can’t be an entirely surprising addition to the match-finding platform.

What makes it cheesy to the point of being surprising is the fact that Match Group seems to be taking the whole thing quite seriously, as if a semi-curated one-second glance at a potential partner is almost (but not quite) the ideal way to find love … or something else.

Tinder and Spotify Team Up

Obviously, some business partnerships bear more fruit than others. That’s just life. On the flip side, just because a partnership is possible, doesn’t mean it has to be forged.

AOL, Inc. and Time Warner Inc (NYSE:TWX) come to mind. The dial-up internet service provider merged with the media company in 2000, and it was largely lauded for their willingness to look to the distant future and position accordingly.

Nine years later, the two organizations split themselves up again, having never figured out how one could make the other better.

What about something a little less dramatic, that was more product-based and didn’t involve the pairing of two distinct companies? How about the new Coke/old Coke debacle of 1985? The Coca-Cola Co (NYSE:KO) altered the taste of the century old cola, not realizing consumers didn’t want a thing changed. A revolt ensued.

If something as innocuous as cola can spark a public outcry, don’t think for a minute adding an individual’s music mix to his or her profile — not to mention a favorite theme-song pick — can’t be that big of a deal. Consumers are not just fickle. They’re strangely fickle.

On the other hand, if there was ever a generation that was accepting of that fact that lines were meant be blurred, it’s the millennials that Tinder primarily serves.

Think about it. This sub-35 crowd will struggle to remember a time when it was unusual for one company to do seemingly unlikely things.

Take e-commerce giant Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) for instance. It’s tough to be believe, but Amazon has been in the on-demand video business since 2006. Now it would seem odd if Amazon wasn’t in the game. Even stranger is the fact that few balked when it was announced high-end fashion designer Alexander Wang was teaming up with Adidas in a co-branding deal that would be been unforgivable 20 years ago.

In that light, the team-up between Tinder and Spotify seems downright benign. And yet …

As evidence that sometimes the best thing to say is nothing at all, Match Group may have ruined an otherwise interesting melding with Spotify by commenting (with complete seriousness) about the new feature and each user’s favorite pick “[It’s] that one song you can’t get out of your head. Where the lyrics of your life meet the rhythm of your soul… With Spotify, we’re fully integrating music into the swiping experience in a brand new way — at a massive, global scale.”

Yes, this is the same Tinder service that lets people make a yay or nay decision based on a carousel of pictures, each looked at for only a matter of seconds, if that. There’s not a lot of soul-searching going on at Tinder … at least not initially. It’s first and foremost a looks-driven app. Adding music interests to the mix isn’t going to change that.

And it’s that comment about the addition of Spotify that makes it clear — Tinder takes itself and its service way too seriously. It’s pictures with music. Swiping isn’t an “experience,” and “global scale” is a sweeping term generally reserved for things that would disrupt the world if they went away. Is it possible the company doesn’t realize where it actually stands with the market?

Bottom Line for MTCH Stock

For those investors who currently own MTCH stock, don’t worry — adding the Spotify angle to the platform is hardly a liability. It may add little actual enhancement to the service, but it’s not a turnoff. In fact, cheesier now or not, it can’t be denied that Match Group continues to grow its top and bottom line.

Still, like any other web-based platform, Tinder can be vulnerable to the strangest of surprising things … including things meant to be upgrades. Just ask MySpace, BlockBuster Video and Abercrombie & Fitch Co. (NYSE:ANF). All three hit a wall at what seemed like a pinnacle of coolness.

As of this writing, James Brumley did not hold a position in any of the aforementioned securities.

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Article printed from InvestorPlace Media, https://investorplace.com/2016/09/tinder-spotify-hook-mtch/.

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