Tag: music behaviour

How can we restore music’s status as social glue in the age of streaming?

Posted on | by Bas Grasmayer

The case for a passive discovery mechanism for friends’ playlists on Spotify.

This article started with a tweet on a Saturday evening. Simply put: I wish I had a better interface to discover playlists that are popular among my friends.

Mark Newman rightfully pointed out that Spotify doesn’t show much interest in surfacing user-created playlists. As a matter of fact, they have even been deemphasising them over the years. Instead they opt for sending people to their own playlists. And their priority makes sense. They have to compete with giants like Apple, Google, Amazon: companies that have money to waste, while Spotify has money to raise.

Streaming is going mainstream

I’m sure to most of us it feels like it’s mainstream already. Hear me out.

Spotify, and other streaming services, are now focusing on consumers beyond the early adopter. These are people that are happy listening to the hits from the radio. These are people that like predictable music experiences. And they’re the bulk of the market.

In order to successfully compete for them, streaming services have to deliver very consistent streaming experiences to these people. This comes in the form of speed, functionality, but also content and programming.

User-created playlists fall outside of Spotify‘s editorial guidelines and metrics that they set for their editors, so it makes it unpredictable. Then again, features like Discover Weekly carry some inherent unpredictability with them: it’s what makes them fun and addictive.

The metrics that a feature like this probably needs to deliver on would look like:

  • Amount of time spent listening to music on Spotify in a specified timeframe (the feature should not lead to less playback);
  • Some kind of retention metric (should lead to a more engaging product, with less people stopping to use it).

Spotify’s friend activity & navigation

I like seeing what my friends are listening to in the right hand bar. Occasionally, but hardly ever, I click on something someone is listening to, and musically stalk my friend.

The reason why I hardly ever tune into my friends that way, and why I think it’s probably not an often-used feature, is because you tend to see it when you’re already listening to something. It’s not really positioned inside the product as a starting point; it’s more of a distraction.

Starting points, in Spotify, are either search or are presented in the left-hand menu. They are your playlists, or the other navigation points, such as podcasts, browse, and Daily Mix.

The prominent placing of Your Daily Mix stands out to me. I find the feature a bit dull and repetitive, but perhaps that’s because I’m on the end of the user spectrum that explores more than returns to the same music. The point is: Spotify gives prominence to an algorithm that generates 5 daily playlists for users. It’s somewhat unpredictable, compared to what they feature in Browse, but it tries to get people into a daily habit, and its prominent placing suggests that this may be working.

What should also be noted is that none of these navigation items include anything social, despite the entire right-hand bar being dedicated to it.

Browse is boring

I’m always disappointed when I open the Browse tab. I never really see anything surprising and I keep seeing the same things over and over, despite not engaging with them.

There are so many super interesting playlists on search, particularly those by third parties, and I need a way to surface them without finding out on curators’ websites, social media, by using search, or by visiting artist profiles.

Your Daily Friend Mix

So, back to my original tweet, and the requirements for getting a social feature to work well:

  • Should lead to people regularly coming back;
  • Should lead to increased playback (or at least no decrease).

What are the constraints?

  • Not enough friends to meaningfully populate an area;
  • Friends don’t listen to playlists;
  • Friends only listen to the same playlists as you;
  • Friends’ tastes are too dissimilar.

The first issue here is already tackled by the way Spotify handles Discover Weekly and its Daily Mixes: if they don’t have enough data on you, they won’t present these features to you. So in short: if there’s not enough useful data to present meaningful results to you, the feature should not be shown.

However for many users there would be meaningful data, so how to make sure that the suggested content is also meaningful?

The UX of recommendations is a big topic, but in simple terms, there should be thresholds and ceilings on similarity:

  • Recommended content should not have a similarity higher than 90% to user’s collection;
  • Recommended content should not have a similarity lower than 10% to user’s collection & listening history.

The recommended content can be playlists made by friends, or ones that friends regularly listen to and / or are subscribed to. The percentages are made-up, and there are a lot more things you could factor in, but this way you make sure that:

  1. Content in the section is interesting, because you’ll discover something new;
  2. And it’s not too random or too far from your taste, so you’ll always find something you’d want to listen to while opening the section.

If that’s taken care of, then people will keep coming back. Why?

Because it’s super fun to discover how your taste overlaps with friends, or to discover new music with friends. I also think such a feature would work better for Spotify‘s demographic than the more active one-on-one music sharing type of functionality (that Spotify removed recently).

Spotify needs a passive way to connect with music through friends

The messaging functionality that Spotify removed showed low engagement. That’s because music one-on-one recommendations are demanding on both sides. Instead, what has shown to work best on big streaming platforms, are lean back experiences. Discover Weekly is an example of that: it’s focused on the result, rather than the action. The action for discovery is exploration: with Discover Weekly, it’s Spotify‘s albums that do most of the exploring for the user.

That’s what the social side of the service needs. The Friend Activity feed is boring. It hardly ever shows something I’d like to listen to, but I do know my friends listen to music I’d be interested in…

What I need is a section that I can go to when I’m looking for something new to listen to, and then shows friends as social proof for that content. It allows me to connect to friends in new ways. Perhaps even strike up a conversation with them on Facebook Messenger.

Which would pair well with Spotify‘s strategy to drive more engagement through Messenger.

How will we remember bands when interfaces are voice-controlled?

Posted on | by Bas Grasmayer

I have phrased the above question as a problem for listeners, but this is a much bigger problem for artists.

The last few weeks have been filled with big news for those closely following voice interfaces. Amazon just announced a bunch of new devices, including a cheaper version of the Echo and a new Echo Plus, that utilize Amazon’s voice assistant Alexa. Google has upgraded its voice assistant, and has included it in new headphones which can automatically translate what people are saying, alongside a bunch of other devices that quite frankly look more exciting than Apple‘s. And to top that all off, multi-room hifi-set producer, Sonos, has just integrated Alexa in its speakers.

The problem in the title is actually easily solved for a listener: you can simply ask what’s playing. However you simply can’t be bothered to ask what’s playing every other song. So this problem is much more important for the artist, than for the listener.

If you haven’t used these devices yet, you may not be aware of some of the challenges, but here they are:

  1. It’s already hard to be remembered – how will people remember you when they don’t even see your name? On our phones or laptops, we occasionally see what’s playing. When we select a playlist, we often see what artists are on there. Something may stick. When we play ask Alexa to play Spotify‘s RapCaviar playlist, we don’t get clues of what’s playing. It’s basically the same as with radio, but at least there you have DJs who will tell you what’s playing. Any music or artist that you don’t care to Shazam will be forgotten.
  2. How do you stay top of mind enough for people to replay you? People often start playing music without looking at their phones or music libraries. This means they request what’s top of mind: artists they remember in that moment, or big brands in music and playlists, such as aforementioned Spotify playlist, Majestic Casual, or Diplo & Friends.
  3. How do you compete with ‘functional music’? The most popular ‘music’ apps on Alexa are all kinds of sleep and meditation sound apps. This list excludes Spotify and other music services, due to a deeper integration with Alexa, but it’s telling: people use these voice interfaces to request music to augment specific activities. Sleeping, bathing, meditating, cooking, whatever.

There are great solutions to these problems. And they’re not hard to figure out (people in hiphop have been shouting their name and their label’s name on tracks for decades).

I may do a follow-up on tactics and strategy for the age of “zero UI”, when the user interface is mostly controlled by voice and artificial intelligence, but for now, I’d love to hear about what you think. Ping me on Twitter: @basgras.

Painting: Wojtek Siudmak – “Le regard gourmand”

What music startup founders often get wrong

Posted on | by Bas Grasmayer

Doing a consumer facing music startup is hard. Especially if you don’t understand what gives music value.

One of the hardest aspects of building music startups is the fact that you’re dealing with a two-sided marketplace scenario. This means you have to build up one side of your marketplace in order to attract the other. It requires creativity, or a lot of funding, in order to build up the music side of your marketplace in order to attract the consumers.

This two-sided marketplace makes decision making more challenging: when to focus on what? How do you convince artists to use yet another platform, before it can really show its value through a well-populated marketplace?

But that’s not the number one thing people get wrong.

The number 1 thing music startup founders get wrong is overvaluing their content

This is the most important lesson I’ve learned while working on 3 different music streaming startups and a bunch of other non-streaming music startups. Music in itself has little value to a user (bear with me). Your value proposition needs to be better than: “come here, there’s music” and often times music startups don’t have anything better than that.

People don’t care about the music. They don’t have a problem listening to music. And if they do, they’re likely not aware of it.

Ironically, when doing consumer-facing music startups the music is an extra. It’s assumed it’s there. Not having good music on your service will kill you, but having it does not distinguish you. It’s the same with restaurants: we don’t visit a restaurant because they have the best food necessarily, but because it’s around the corner, they have something we feel like, the staff is nice, etc. Music, on a music service, is like the basic expectations of what we expect in a restaurant: food, drinks, a place to sit, and a toilet. Not having music, like not having toilets, will kill you, but it’s not the reason why people visit you.

This is why so many music discovery apps fail, why so many social jukebox or recommendation apps fail: people don’t need more content. Music’s availability is not where the problem is, the context is where the problem is.

Building music startups is about the functionality you add. That’s what people pay for, that’s how people stick to your platform. Not the ideals of better-paid artists, not ‘high quality streaming’ – these are basic expectations by now. People need to find a very simple answer to the question: what can they do with your service that they can’t do elsewhere?

Then the next question is whether it’s distinctive enough. I think that’s why high quality streaming startups tend to remain marginal: lossless streaming on its own is not enough to convince large consumer segments. It has to be about behaviour, about function. By now, lossless streaming isn’t hard to find, so people look for the checkbox and then look at what else the platform has to offer.

At the peak of its popularity, Crazy Frog as a track on iTunes was $1. As a ringtone, it was $3. The functionality is what made it valuable. (hat tip to Ed Peto for bringing this up)

I also think 360-degree concert videos are not distinctive enough from other types of video. As a matter of fact, I think the inconvenience of them outweighs the value when compared to other types of concert videos.

Let’s widen the perspective.

The value of music is elusive

A single song can mean the world to someone. It can help sell millions of products, it can inspire revolutions.

But in an ocean of millions of songs, that are easily accessible, its value is close to zero for a person as a consumer. This is why nobody cares about your free download anymore.

So how do you get the value out?

You use the music to create the environment in which you shape the type of thing people are willing to pay for. Going back to the restaurant metaphor: music means your walls, your tables, your staff, your bathrooms, your building, your ambiance. People pay for that, but indirectly: by paying for the food you serve them in that context.

More:

Just to be really clear: I think music has immense value and I dedicate most of my waking hours to it. When I talk about ‘value’ in the above piece, I talk about it from the consumer perspective, from the marketing perspective, and as a USP for a product. I am not saying that people are not willing to pay for music. Millions already are, every month, through streaming subscriptions, but also digital and physical sales. And that’s where the problem begins for music startup founders: if people are already paying for music, what more can you sell them?

The short answer: sell functionality that augments experience and behaviour.

Four of the biggest opportunities for the future of music consumption

Posted on | by Bas Grasmayer

A reflection on key trends in music, tech, and user interfaces.

Soundcloud is saved, for now. On top of whatever strategic decisions they make to be able to attract follow-up investments, they face the difficult task of preserving their user community’s trust and winning back part of the trust they already lost. Tumultuous times are ahead, which will be frustrating, but also very exciting as it creates opportunity for new innovation and startups to claim their piece of the pie.

Underserved early adopter: the Myspace moment

Back in April I wrote about the fact that music is about to experience another Myspace moment. What I mean by that is that when Myspace hit decline, as it lost its community’s trust, new platforms got a chance as early adopters bailed and moved on. Musicians started building up audiences on Facebook and Twitter, and sharing their music on Soundcloud.

Now we see another Myspace moment: Spotify is focusing on mass audiences, and the prime early adopter platform has a distressed community due to the continuous struggles that Soundcloud has faced over the last years.

This creates opportunities for concepts such as:

  • Connecting groups of music listeners based on music taste or curiosity:
    • Soundcloud‘s struggling with this due to its failure to keep its search & tagging feature useful as the amount of content grew over the years, and they killed their groups feature;
    • Spotify has deprioritized user-created playlists and removed messaging functionality.
    • TheWaveVR could be one of the startups to fill this gap.
  • Collaboration and feedback:
    • If people are leaving Soundcloud, they need to take that somewhere else.
    • Audiu, which was one of the hottest startups at Sonar+D this year, could play a big role here.
  • Promo services for people who need an easy way to share music to journalists, labels, etc.

You could come up with a lot more ideas and find startups striving to make a meaningful impact there.

A third device in our midst: the Voice User Interface (VUI)

I’ve recently been playing around with an Amazon Alexa I ordered. At first I was skeptical and thought it would always feel awkward, but you get used to it fast and the convenience of a voice-controlled device in the living room (and other rooms) is bigger than I expected. I thought all those times you have to grab your mobile phone, or look something up on the computer, were minor and infrequent inconveniences. Now, the VUI has embedded itself into my life and all kinds of small habits, patterns and every day rituals.

VUIs are going to be the third device: first came PCs (plus laptops), then came smartphones (plus tablets), and now we’re going to get a third addition through voice-controlled devices like Amazon Alexa, Google Home, Apple‘s Siri-based devices, devices in the car, etc. Perhaps this is why Tesla is in talks to do a music streaming service: music is the way into these spaces.

So what happens to the way we browse and explore music when we take the visual user interface away? What place does the smartphone get? What place does the laptop get? And what behaviour extends to our smart speakers?

What happens in AI is very important for VUI apps, but also for chatbots.

Conversational interfaces: the rise of messaging apps

Messaging has frequently been called the next major platform. It enables chatbots, which are apps that live on conversational platforms (this is a trend that’s also strengthened by VUIs). Some of the biggest social platforms to rise up over the last decade were primarily messaging apps, such as  Snapchat, Whatsapp, Telegram, and Kik.

The next step of the social web is messaging, but smarter than the AIM, ICQ, and chatroom phase of social. Facebook is positioning Messenger in such a way that it can live as a platform on its own.

Read Music Ally‘s write-up of the chatbot panel I moderated at Midem.

Short-form video

I urge people to try out Instagram Stories and figure out what it takes to make good content for it. Short-form video content is so important in an age of short attention spans. Some of the hottest platforms to emerge among teens in the last years have been Snapchat and Musically, both limiting the time-length of videos being shared on the platforms. It’s fun, fast, and requires low commitment: making users share and explore more content.

I firmly believe this is going to change the way we write songs and structure them. We’ve already seen how the streaming playlist economy made tracks shorter, with people moving the vocals to the start of the track in order to make skips less likely. In the next years, the video story format is going to strongly impact music.

Instagram is another platform that may fare very well from the decline of user trust in Soundcloud‘s community.

 

I’ll be discussing more of these trends in my newsletter, which goes out every week on Monday. Sign up to stay in the loop.

AI-created non-human music will need human narratives

Posted on | by Bas Grasmayer

To me, it’s beyond a doubt that we’ll all be listening to AI-created music within a few decades, and probably much sooner. The most important way in for this type of music is mood playlists. After the first couple of songs on such playlists, most people tune the music out and get back to their main activity. Does it really matter who has created the song then? Does it matter whether they’re alive? Does it matter whether they’ve ever been alive at all?

[EDIT Aug 15: a small disclaimer since a piece linking here makes an incorrect claim. I don’t think all AI-created music needs a human narrative. I believe the future contains a lot of adaptive, and generative music. More on my point of view in this piece: Computers won’t have to be creative]

We are all creative, and therefore I think it doesn’t matter whether computers will be able to be creative. We are creative as listeners. Computers will be able to predict what we like, then test thousands of versions on playlists until they have the exact right version of the song. As a matter of fact, AI offers the prospect of personalized music, or music as precision medicine as The Sync Project calls it.

A point that’s made often is that AI-created music lacks part of the story people expect with music. People bring it up as an obstacle that can’t be overcome, but it feels like that’s just because of a decision to stop thinking as soon as the point is brought up. Let’s think further.

For one, I think AI-created music already is and will continue to be born in collaboration with people. People will increasingly take the role of curators of music created through algorithms. Secondly, why not give music a story?

Last week at IDAGIO Tech Talks, the music streaming service for classical music where I’m Product Director, we had the pleasure of hearing Ivan Yamshchikov talk about his neural network capable of music composition. With his colleague, Alexey Tikhonov, they fed their system 600 hours of compositions and had it compose a new work in the style of Scriabin. The human narrative was added at the end: as it was performed live by acclaimed musicians (see below).

This is how you get people to knowingly listen to music by artificial intelligence. Most consumption of AI music will be through ignorance of the source of the music. Yet people will warm up to the idea of AI being involved in the music creation process, just like they warmed up to electric guitars, samplers, and computers being used as instruments.

And that’s the narrative that will make it human: artificial intelligence as an instrument which requires a whole new skill set for artists to successfully work with it, and evoke in listeners what they want to.

6 lessons from 6 weeks without net neutrality

Posted on | by Bas Grasmayer

My music consumption has been clearly impacted by the lack of net neutrality on my new mobile plan. Here are my key takeaways as a heavy user of music services.

This Spring, I moved from The Netherlands to Berlin, which means setting up new contracts for everything. While I’m still waiting for my flat to be connected to the internet (for 2 months already!), my mobile plan is keeping me connected.

My mobile provider Telekom, known as T-Mobile in most countries, is zero-rating certain partner services. So data consumed by streaming from the Netflix or YouTube bundles are not deducted from my 6GB / month data bundle.

I decided to give the bundle a try, as I think the EU will eventually declare zero-rating in violation of net neutrality (which means the telco should compensate me or release me from the plan). Net neutrality demands that you treat all traffic the same, and while they’re not prioritizing traffic of particular services over others in terms of speed, zero-rating does influence consumer decisions over what service they use.

Here are my main take aways of living without net neutrality for the last 6 weeks or so.

1. Zero-rating influences the services you use

This is beyond a doubt for me. When I want to listen to music, I now search music on YouTube (zero-rated partner) instead of through Spotify (not a zero-rated partner). I basically only listen to Spotify through offline synced music, and have stopped using it as a way to explore music – until I get WiFi at home, or Spotify gets zero-rated.

Telekom's current zero-rated partners
Telekom’s current zero-rated partners

2. Spotify’s stickiness is strong

Despite the fact that Apple Music, Amazon Prime Music, and Napster (Rhapsody) are all included in the zero-rated partners, I’ve somehow stuck with Spotify. I have so many years of history in there, that it’s hard to start using a different app.

I have a lot of friends on Apple Music, because they were the first major Western music service to launch in Russia and really double down on the market (as opposed to Deezer, which struggled to gain traction). Having lived there a few years, most of my friends are on there now. But having done 2 three month trials, I never really developed a feeling for the service. Can’t stand iTunes either by the way (I listen to files through VLC Mediaplayer instead).

But the key point here is:

Music is not the most important part of music services. It’s the behaviours around the music. For Spotify, the only service that has managed to help me find a new home for some of my behaviours is YouTube, but to move collection management to a new place: no way.

And to clarify that first statement: if you have all the music, and a lot of other services do too, the music is no longer the key point that people come to you for. People never had a music access problem: piracy solved that. The music access issue was an industry problem, not a consumer-problem.

3. It’s hard to dig into niches through YouTube’s mobile app

I’ve been trying to use the YouTube app as a kind of radio station, because it sucks to search for decent playlists in there. The problem with the Play Next function, is that when you start on something very niche, it sends you ‘upward’ to more popular tracks. So if you’re listening to underground trap, you end up on Migos after a couple of tracks.

Likewise for related music on particular music videos. You have to sift through unrelated recommendations that are related to your personal profile, rather than the particular thing you’re viewing, but even then, it directs you out of the niche and into the mainstream.

4. Netflix finally found its way into my life

I’ve never really developed a strong habit for Netflix, but it finally happened. Browsing the web, and reading article after article, gets tiring when you’re doing it from a small mobile screen (I’m on iPhone 5s).

Besides, I get ‘data anxiety’: am I using too much data? Will I have enough data at the end of the month? Better play it safe: Netflix.

This actually pulls me away from Reddit, Instagram, Facebook, and other social platforms. Which brings me to my next point.

5. Using YouTube as my default mobile music service is keeping me from social networks

The thing with YouTube is that it can’t keep playing music in the background, unless you are on a certain subscription that’s not available in Germany.

Because of this, I have to choose: am I going to listen to music, or am I going to write to a friend, see what they’re posting on Instagram, etc.

6. If I cared less about music, I’d switch services

The reason why I’m using YouTube, if not obvious by now, is because it’s a nice temporary space to do some of the things I’d prefer to do on Spotify.

But if I were less invested in Spotify, I’d 100% be using one of the partner services offered. I would not even consider any other options. And I think this goes for most consumers, who are not quite as heavy users of music services. It’s troubling: it gives ISPs and mobile operators a lot of control over the music, video, and social landscape.

And for one aspect of music, it already changed me over: I stopped watching live streams on Facebook and Twitch, and instead the only place where I watch live video is YouTube now.