Steamboat Springs has a music album on Spotify. Not a playlist of their lodge ambiance or an employee-curated mood board — an actual album, with original songs that were written for Steamboat’s ad campaigns back in the day, now reimagined and released on a modern streaming platform. I love this. Not just because it’s creative and unexpected, but because it solves a real problem that most resort marketing teams are completely ignoring: sound.
We Underestimate What Sound Does to Brand Memory
There’s real neuroscience behind why a jingle or a theme song can stay stuck in your head for decades while you forget a perfectly well-designed billboard by the time you’ve driven a mile. According to research on sensory branding, auditory cues trigger emotional memory recall more reliably than visual ones in many contexts. Steamboat’s team understands this intuitively — according to Steamboat’s own Morgan Bast, sound is a powerful tool that brands chronically underuse. She’s right. And most ski resorts are proof of it.
Think about the brands you feel something about. Not just the logos you recognize — the ones that actually make you feel something. How many of them have a sound associated with them? Intel’s bong. The Netflix “ta-dum.” The NFL opening theme. What does your resort sound like? If you can’t answer that in three seconds, you might have a gap worth thinking about.
Why Spotify Is Smarter Than It Sounds
Releasing an album on Spotify isn’t just nostalgia for its own sake — it’s a distribution play. SlopeFillers pointed out that Steamboat is tapping into a massive distribution channel that ski resorts have almost entirely ignored. Spotify has 600+ million active users. The average listener spends 30+ minutes per day on the platform. Your resort’s Instagram reaches people who are already following you. Spotify can reach people who’ve never heard of you, in a context where they’re emotionally open and actively seeking feeling.
What Your Resort Can Actually Steal From This
You don’t need a Steamboat-level history of commissioned ad campaigns to act on this idea. Here’s the practical version: what songs, sounds, or musical moments are already associated with your mountain in your regulars’ minds? Your regular Saturday morning DJ set. The song that was playing when the freshies opened. That local band who plays your closing day every year. Those exist at almost every resort — they’re just not being leveraged yet.
The simplest move? A curated Spotify playlist that captures the vibe of your mountain. Not a generic “ski vibes” playlist — a branded one, with local artists, songs that reflect your terrain and culture, maybe a few throwback tracks that your longtime guests will recognize. It costs almost nothing to create and puts your brand in ears that social media never reaches. We’ve talked about how important it is to differentiate marketing channels in our platform diversification breakdown — audio is the most underused channel in the playbook.
The Long Game of Sensory Branding
What Steamboat is doing by releasing this album isn’t just about 2026 marketing. It’s about creating the kind of memory that lives in people for 30 years. The skiers who were kids when those original ad campaigns ran are adults with disposable income now. Some of them are exactly the audience Steamboat wants for a vacation package. Touching that nostalgia through music is one of the most cost-effective brand plays you can run. And the cool part? The album also creates a story — and SlopeFillers wrote about it, which means it’s already generating earned media from a source resort marketers actually read.
What does your resort sound like? Not your on-mountain playlist — your brand. If you haven’t thought about it, Steamboat’s Spotify album is a pretty good reason to start. Would love to hear what you come up with if you try it.
