Almost every week, Spotify adds a Moby track to my Discover Weekly or Release Radar playlists – probably the playlists I listen to the most. The problem is: I don’t like Moby, and he’s not going away.
I’ve figured out exactly why Spotify keeps recommending me Moby. I’ve also figured out what types of user behaviour can discourage a recommendation system from continuing to recommend certain music. On Spotify, skips are weighted heavily. That is to say, if you skip a track, Spotify interprets it as you not liking a song or artist. I quite consistently skip the Moby tracks in my recommended playlists, but a week goes by and there he is again.
The Moby problem is not actually about Moby. It’s about the way recommendation algorithms work, and about the way we feed music data to them. The reason why Spotify keeps recommending me Moby is because I have a few Moby works in some of my playlists. I actually like his early rave stuff from the 90s, but I don’t care much for his chill out and trip hoppy stuff. Moby is perhaps also one of the most remixed electronic artists. Occasionally (and rarely), a really great remix sneaks into my playlists.
Hypothesis: playlists are weighted more heavily than skips
Three factors around playlists seem to be playing a role in Spotify’s assumption that I love Moby:
Moby’s inclusion in my playlists (passive)
Moby being played from my own playlist (active)
Moby being added to my playlists (active)
The weight in the algorithm should probably get heavier towards the bottom of this list, since it signals stronger intention and commitment. There may be many other factors at play too.
The fact that I like a couple of songs from an artist, some of which from over 20 years ago, does not mean I’d like to be kept up to date on his newest music though. Most of the Moby tracks that appear in my Release Radar are actually inter-genre remixes, so that really doesn’t make much sense either (e.g. if I like drum & bass, why would I like a techno remix of a drum & bass song?).
The remix problem
Then there’s another issue with remixes. One of my most-played playlists, called If Red Bull was Music, includes an EDM remix of a Moby track. It’s the only Moby track I listen to regularly, besides perhaps the Moby stuff in my Discover Weekly and Release Radar, when I forget to skip.
The problem is: it’s not a Moby track anymore. Sure, Moby is the original artist, but it doesn’t sound like a Moby track at all. It’s almost like categorizing a hiphop beat that samples Mozart as a piece of classical music.
It seems like Spotify is barely taking this into account when two artists can be lumped into the same category (electronic), even when that category is too broad to mean anything.
The solution
Let me banish artists! Give me a big fat ban button.
But hey, I’m a product person: I know the Moby problem is a symptom and you shouldn’t develop features to address symptoms — that’s how you kill a good product.
Personally, I think it’s important for them to look at how users interact with the music in their recommended mix playlists, and then weigh that much heavier. No engagement with a certain artist (or actually: skips), then that artist slowly becomes invisible, like in the Facebook news feed.
So to whomever is succeeding Matt Ogle, one of the creators of Discover Weekly, who just departed Spotify for Instagram, please solve my Moby problem. Let me escape this filter bubble.
(Just in case: hey Moby, I love your music, but most of it just doesn’t fit my taste so well. Keep doing what you’re doing!)
The emphasis of playlist strategy is usually placed on how artists can get their music on popular curated playlists. Let’s discuss the long-term value of artists stepping into the curator role themselves.
In the context of this article, when referring to playlist strategy, I mean playlists that you create.
For most of the readers of this article, the two most important places for developing a cohesive playlist strategy are YouTube and Spotify (and maybe Soundcloud). They’re the places with the highest amount of traffic and search queries.
Objectives
You’re going to be using your playlists to achieve 3 things:
To get discovered by (potential) new fans;
To establish a habit for fans that keeps them connected to you;
To create regular engaging content for your socials to help you stay top of mind for fans.
Discovery. Habit. Top of mind.
Building your playlists
Let’s address objective 1 first: getting your music discovered. This is the main concern for most artists. Before anything, your music has to be good. If people are not sharing your music, it’s probably not that great. This needs to be your #1 concern and priority. If people are not sharing your music, go work on your sound instead of marketing something that people don’t care about.
Keep reading if you’re actually at a level where your music gets traffic through friend recommendations.
You’re ready to get your music discovered.
Variety
Take a couple of your best tracks. For each of these tracks, create a playlist. Add tracks from similar artists, artists that inspire you, anything that is somehow logically related to your music.
Understand that a lot of users will start playing your playlist and then switch to background listening. The logical relation has to be there, even when people are focusing on a different tab in their browser, or have moved on to another activity away from the computer.
For the music you select, the most important criterium is that it has to be music that people actually search for.
People will type search queries, and you need to create the best chance that they will land on your playlist. Think carefully the first few times you make these playlists. Over time, you’ll find the best way to do it and the amount of effort required will decrease.
Do not place your track at the top. People need somewhat familiar content to get into a playlist. Place it somewhere in the middle.
Remember the listener’s perspective: this is not about your music — this is about their experience. If you provide them with a good experience, they’ll listen to your music. If you don’t, they won’t. Simple.
Consistency & regularity
You’re going to pick a day of the week and every week you’re going to update your playlist on that day. If your playlists delight your listeners, they’ll check back every week on that day (that’s why Spotify’s Discover Weekly feature is so important to them).
This means you let people create a habit around your playlists. And while all other content of the playlists might change every week, you’ll have at least one of your tracks in there. So, the habit implies that returning listeners will listen to you every week.
It’s an elegant way to make sure fans don’t miss out on new music through their cluttered Facebook and Twitter feeds and inboxes.
Bi-weekly is also ok. Monthly is a maybe. Anything irregular is a big no. Either you execute this strategy, or you don’t. This particular strategy only works when applied consistently and with fixed regularity.
YouTube vs Spotify
YouTube and Spotify require their own approaches. They’re very different services, that drive very different types of music listening behaviours, bookmarking, etc.
For YouTube, I’d focus on making an ever-growing set of playlists from your main channel where you also post your music videos. It might net you subscribers, too.
This means every YouTube playlist becomes a finished product. Keep them short: roughly 10 tracks. Every week, you’ll create a new playlist with new content, and one of your tracks in there. Share it on your socials: some nice new content for fans.
For Spotify, you’re going to do something different. They’ve actually demoted user-generated playlists in search results, so it’s a bit harder to get found now. So, instead, you’re going to turn it into a tool to connect with your fans and familiarize them with your music taste.
Your Spotify playlists should be longer. 30 tracks or more. Think of them more as radio stations that are refreshed every week. Your followers check in, tune into the new content and also reconnect to your music (like the Diplo & Friends playlist).
User stories
I want to explain a concept from product management called ‘user stories’ — they’re used to describe certain things people expect from or want to be able to do with a product or service. They’re a useful way to not lose sight of what’s important to the people you’re making something for. What’s important to you, is not always what’s important to your target audience.
For your fans
Let’s think from the perspective of fans. And let’s define fan as someone who has shared your music with someone else. Facebook likes don’t count. We’re talking about the people who care enough about your music to share it with others.Â
Let’s think of some of the reasons why they might be interested in your playlist:
“I want to learn more about the music that inspires this artist.”
“I’ve already heard everything by this artist, but I want more!”Â
“I wonder what other music this DJ / producer plays besides his own tracks.”
As people get more familiar with your playlists, they may start to develop some more specific expectations, such as “I want to know about the freshest new releases this artist curates” or “I just need some great party music” and they associate your playlists with that.
Focus on the bullet pointed user stories first. You need to get people in, and then get them to form a habit. There are a lot of people creating good playlists for more specific purposes, but the advantage of the bullet pointed items is that they’re all focused on you — and nobody does you like you.
For people who don’t know you
This gets more tricky, because there are so many reasons why someone might land on your playlist. Think about what kind of music you’re curating. What are people trying to achieve when they’re searching for that type of music? A lot of them are going to land on your playlist by looking for an artist other than you, Four Tet for example.
“I want to listen to Four Tet.”
Yup – some people will just click the first playlist they see if it includes Four Tet and they spot the cover art.
“I want to listen to music like Four Tet.”
“I just want to put on some chill out music and not think about it.”
“I want to listen to a playlist that includes music like Four Tet.”
“I’m curious about discovering more music like Four Tet.”
Although similar, these are different motivations that correspond with different behaviour types. It also means people will judge the quality of your playlist differently (quality is defined as to whether it scratches the person’s itch).
Long term effects
If you do well, your music might actually become associated with the other acts you include in your playlists. This means algorithms will add it to the ‘play next’ queue on YouTube, to ‘similar artists’ on Spotify, or even have you appear in the Discover Weekly of people who listen to a lot of music like that.
Your playlist may become a brand on its own: something artists try to get their music featured in. This means you’re able to shine a light on great artists you feel are not getting enough recognition. Then there will be the people who follow you on playlists, but not on other socials. These may be actual fans (people who share your music) or just people who are into the music you curate.
Playlists are a social medium in their own right. Treat them like that.
Today Iâm excited to announce that Iâm joining IDAGIO, a streaming service for classical music lovers, as Director of Product. Iâm already in the process of relocating to Berlin, where Iâll be joining the team later this month.
In this post, I want to explain why I so strongly believe in this niche focused music service and IDAGIOâs mission. I also want to shed light on the future of MUSIC x TECH x FUTURE as a newsletter, a type of media, and an agency. (tl;dr: the newsletter lives on!)
Two months ago, a friend whom I had worked with in Moscow, at music streaming service Zvooq, forwarded me a vacancy as a Twitter DM. By then, I had developed a kind of mental auto-ignore, because friends kept sending me junior level vacancies in music companies. I was never looking for a âjobââââI had a job (but thanks for thinking of me â¤ď¸). However, I trusted that this friend knew me better as a professional, so I opened the link.
I was immediately intrigued. I hadnât heard of IDAGIO before, but Iâve spent a lot of time thinking about niche services. At one point, the plan for Zvooq was to not build a typical one-size-fits-all app like all the other music streaming services are doing, but instead it would be to split different types of music-related behaviours into smaller apps. The goal would then become to monopolize those behaviours: like Google has monopolized search behaviour (now called Googling), and Shazam has monopolized Shazaming. Long term, it would allow us to expand that ecosystem of apps beyond streaming content, so we would be able to monetize behaviours with higher margins than behaviours related to music listening.
We ended up building just one, Fonoteka, before we had to switch strategies due to a mix of market reality, licensing terms, and burn rate. That was fine: it was what the business needed, and what Russia as a market needed.
Since then, there have been a number of niche music ideas, like services for indie rock, high quality streaming, etc. And while those are all commendable, I was never quite interested in them, because it just seemed like those services would not have a strong enough strategic competitive advantage in the face of tech giants with bulging coffers. Their offers were often also just marginally better, but getting people to install an app and build a habit around your service, unlearn their old solution, learn to do it your way⌠thatâs a huge thing to ask of people, especially once you need to go beyond the super early adopters.
But niche works on a local level. You can see it with Yandex.Music and Zvooq in Russia, with Anghami in the Middle East, and Gaana in India.
Over the last decade, Iâve lived in Russia, Bulgaria, Turkey, and The Netherlands (where Iâm from). Each country has unique ways of interacting with music. Music has a different place in each culture. I think local music services work, because they combine catalogues and local taste with a deep understanding of how their target audience connects to music. It allows them to build something catering exactly to those behaviours. Itâs music and behaviour combined.
When I started talking to the IDAGIO team, I soon understood that they too combine these elements. Classical music, in all its shapes and forms, has many peculiarities, which will remain an object of study for me for the next years. The fact that the same work often has a multitude of recordings by different performers already sets it apart. One can map a lot of behaviours around navigation, exploring, and comparison to just this one fact.
An example of one way in which IDAGIO lets people explore various performances of the same work.
Despite being younger and having more modest funding, IDAGIO has already built a product that caters better to classical music fans than the other streaming services do (and also serves lossless streams). Understanding that, I was fast convinced that this was something I seriously needed to consider.
So I got on a plane and met the team. Over the course of three days, we ran a condensed design sprint, isolated a problem we wanted to tackle together, interviewed expert team members, explored options, drew up solutions, and prototyped a demo to test with the target audience. Itâs an intense exercise, especially when youâre also being sized up as a potential team member, but the team did such a good job at making me feel welcome and at home (â¤ď¸). Through our conversations, lunches, and collaboration, I was impressed with the teamâs intelligence, creativity, and general thoughtfulness.
Then I spent some extra time in Berlinâââafter all, Iâd be moving there. Aforementioned friend took me to a medical museum with a room full of glass cabinets containing jars with contents which will give me nightmares for years to come. Besides that, I met a bunch of other friends, music tech professionals, and entrepreneurs, who collectively convinced me of the high caliber of talent and creative inspiration in the city.
Returning home, I made a decision I didnât expect to make this year, nor in the years to come. A decision to make a radical switch in priorities.
Motivation, for me, comes from the capacity to grow and to do things with meaningful impact. MUSIC x TECH x FUTURE has exposed me to a lot of different people, a lot of different problems, and has allowed me to do what I find interesting, what Iâm good at, but also what I grow and learn from. With IDAGIO I can do all of the latter, but with depth, and with a team.
Classical music online has been sidelined a bit. It makes a lot of sense when you place it in a historical perspective: a lot has changed in recent years. The webâs demographic skews older now. You can notice this by counting the number of family members on Facebook. The internet used to be something most adults would just use for work, so if you were building entertainment services, you target the young, early adopter demographic. Thatâs pop music, rock, electronic, hiphop, etc. Classical was there, sure, but Spotify wasnât designed around it, iTunes wasnât, YouTube wasnât.
Now weâre actually reaching a new phase for music online. The streaming foundation has been built. Streaming is going mainstream. The platforms from the 2007â2009 wave are maturing and looking beyond their original early adopter audiences⌠So weâre going to see a lot of early adopters that are not properly served anymore. Theyâre going to migrate, look for new homes. A very important segment there, one that has always been underserved, are classical music fans. And now, this niche audience is sizeable enough to actually build a service around.
Why? Well, the internet has changed since the large last wave of music startups. Mobile is becoming the default way people connect to the web. For adults, this has made the web less of a thing for âworkâ, and has made entertainment more accessible. Connected environments make it easy to send your mobile audio to your home hifi set, or car speakers. The amount of people on the internet has more than doubled.
This makes the niche play so much more viable than just a few years ago. It has to be done with love, care, and a very good understanding of whose problem youâre trying to solve (and what that problem is). IDAGIO has exactly the right brilliant minds in place to pull this off and Iâm flattered that in 2 weeks time, Iâll get to spend 2,000 hours a year with them.
What happens to the agency?
Iâll be winding down the agency side of MxTxF. This means Iâm not taking on any more clients, but Iâm happy to refer you to great people I know. Some longer term projects, that just take a couple of hours per week, Iâll keep on to bring to completion.
What happens to the newsletter?
The newsletter goes on! I get a lot of personal fulfilment out of it. The agency was born out of the newsletter, so who knows what more it will spawn. Iâm actually figuring out a way to add audio and video content to the mix. I expect Midem and SĂłnar+D next June will be pilots for that. Berlin is a great place for music tech, so if anything, I hope the newsletter will only get more interesting as time goes on.
Besides the personal fulfilment, it allows me to be in touch with this wonderful community, to meet fascinating people, and occasionally to help organise a panel and bring some of my favourite minds into the same room at the same time.
If youâd like to support the newsletter, you can help me out on Patreon. You can become a patron of the newsletterâââwith your support, I can add extra resources to the newsletter, which will let me push the content to the next level (high on the list: a decent camera).
Elgar making an early recording of the work in 1920. Those pipes are acoustic recording horns, which were piped to a diaphragm which would vibrate a cutting stylusâââdirectly turning sound waves into a material recording.
Iâd love to hear about your favourite works and recordings. Feel free to email me on bg@idagio.com, with a link, and tell me what I should listen for.
Whether you’ve ever used Snapchat or not, you have felt the influence of the social app’s design choices. How will it shape the future of music?
Snapchat is perhaps best known for its photo filters
Snapchat created something called ‘Stories’. Stories are composed of photos and short videos that stay available for 24 hours. They allow people to get a look into other people’s days, including celebrities. The feature has been shamelessly copied by Facebook and integrated in Instagram, but the low-barrier channel-flicking content format is now seeing integration in unexpected places.
I decided to take a stab at the challenge and conceptualize how people may interact with music in the future.
How people engage with content
I specifically looked at Soundcloud, Instagram, and Tinder for some of the most innovative and influential design choices for navigating, sharing, and engaging with content. Soundcloud for the music, Instagram for visuals, and Tinder for how it lets people sift through ‘content’. I apologize in advance for all the times I’m going to refer to people on Tinder as ‘content’, but that’s the most effective way to approach Tinder for the sake of this article.
Learning from Soundcloud
One key strength of Soundcloud is that every time you open the app or web client there’s new content for you. Either from the artists you follow, through its Explore feature, or through personalized recommendations. People should be able to check out content as soon as they open the app.
Text is easy to engage with: you can copy the parts you want to comment on, quote it, and comment. With audio this is harder. Soundcloud lets people comment on the timeline of tracks, which makes it much more fun to engage with content. YouTube solves this problem by letting people put time tags in comments.
If you really love the content, you can repost it to your network. This makes the service attractive to content creators, but also to fans, because the feature gives them a way to express themselves and build up their profiles without actually having to create music themselves. Compare this to Spotify, where the barrier to build up your profile as a user is much higher due to the energy that you have to put into creating (and maintaining) playlists.
Recommendations mean that people can jump in, hit play and stop thinking. Soundcloud is one of the few music services that seem to have found a great balance between very active types of behaviour, as well as more passive modes.
Learning from Instagram
There’s a reason why I’m highlighting Instagram instead of Snapchat. Instagram has two modes of creation and navigation. You can either scroll down your main feed, where people will typically only post their best content OR you can tap one of the stories at the top and watch a feed of Snapchat-like Stories. Tap to skip!
Instagram makes it really easy to create and navigate through content. Stories’ ephemeral quality reduces the barrier to sharing moments (creating) and makes people worry less that they’re ‘oversharing’. Snapchatâs filters, which Instagram hasn’t been able to clone well (yet), make it easy to create fun content. People open up their camera, see what filters are available, and create something funny. No effort, and it’s still fun for their friends or followers to watch.
Learning from Tinder
The brutal nature of dating services is that profiles (people) are content, which also means that the majority of users will not be interested in the majority of content offered on the service. So you can do two things: make going through content as effortless as possible and build a recommendation engine which delivers the most relevant content to users. Tinderâs focus on the former made them the addictive dating app they are today.
Quickly liking and disliking content is like a bookmarking function which also helps to feed information to recommendation algorithms.
If you really want to dive deeper into a piece of content, you can tap to expand it (open profile), but basically the app’s figured out a great way to present huge amounts of content to people, of which the majority is ‘irrelevant’, and make it engaging to quickly navigate through it.
Must haves
The key qualities of social content apps right now are a high volume of content, easy creation and interactivity, and fast navigation. Bookmarking and reposting allows for users to express themselves with little effort.
Breaking it down
This is the most important feature for the end user. There are already a lot of good services in order to access large catalogues, to dive deep, to search for specific content… Music Stories should not try to compete with that. Instead it is a new form of media, which needs to be so engaging that it will affect the creative decisions of artists.
Soundcloudâs feed is a good example, but so is Snapchatâs main Stories screen (pictured below). Both show the user a variety of content that they can engage with immediately by hitting the play button or by tapping on a profile image.
The content in the app needs to be bite-size so users can get a quick idea of the content immediately and decide whether they like it or not. If yes, they should be able to go deeper (eg. Tinder‘s ‘tap to expand’) or interact, like reposting. If not, they need to be able to skip and move on.
When a user has an empty content feed, you can serve recommendations. When a user went through all new content already, you should invite them to create something.
You want people to be able to lean back, but ideally you’ll pull people into your app a few times a day and get them to browse through some fresh content. To get them to re-open the app, there needs to be meaningful interaction. That can come in the form of swipes, comments, or remixing.
One of the cool things about Snapchat is that you can discover new filters through your friends. Think:
“Woah, you can be Harry Potter? I want to be Harry Potter, too!”
So if we extend that to Music Stories, creating some music idea needs to be as simple as making yourself look like Harry Potter or face-swapping with a painting or statue in a museum.
Snapchat is why millennials visit museums. (jk)
This means that artists should be able to add music to the app in a way that allows people to remix it, to make it their own. All remixes can stay linked to the original. You could even track a remix of a remix of a remix in the same way you can see repost-chains on Tumblr.
How do you make it easy to create and to interact with music?
That’s the biggest challenge. People are shy or may not feel creative. Â You could let them use images or video (like Musically), or you could let them replace one of the samples in the beat with a sound from their environment (imagine replacing the “yeah” from Justin Timberlake‘s SexyBack with your own sound), or you could let them play with the pitch of the vocals.
Options need to be limited, easy-to-understand and manipulate, and inviting. It should be as simple as swiping through Snapchat filter options.
Through creation and interactivity, users build up a profile to show off their music identity. Content is ephemeral, unless you choose differently (like on Instagram). I’d go for ephemeral by default and then give users the option to ‘add to profile’ once content reaches a certain engagement threshold. This will need a lot of tweaking and testing to get right.
Interactions are not ephemeral. Reposts go straight to profile, until you undo them.
Stories are all about being able to jump through content quickly. Tinderâs Like / Dislike function could work in Music Stories as a ‘skip’ and ‘bookmark’ function. By letting people bookmark stuff they’ll have content to come back to when they’re in a more passive mode. Perhaps an initial Like would send music to a personal inbox which stays available for a limited time, then when you Like content that’s in that inbox it gets shared to your profile, or saved in some other manner.
Music Stories should NOT be a Tinder for Music. Tinderâs strength is to let users navigate through a lot of content that doesn’t appeal to them, while making the interaction interesting. It’s an interesting model that manages to create value from content that may be irrelevant to some users.
Translating to features
The next steps are to start translating the concept into features. This means user stories (what you want users to be able to do with the app) need to be articulated clearly. Mock ups of specific interactions need to be drawn and tested with audiences. Challenges need to be considered, like the classic issue of getting people to start creating content when there’s no audience in the app yet (Instagram solved this by letting people share content to other social networks).
Now I invite YOU to take this challenge and develop the vision for Music Stories.
Why the next big innovation in music will change music itselfâââand how our moods are in the driverâs seat for that development.
Over the last half year, Iâve had the pleasure to publish two guest contributions in MUSIC x TECH x FUTURE about our changing relationship with music.
Then last week, James Lynden shared his research into how Spotify affects mood and found out that people are mood-aware when they make choices on the service (emphasis mine):
Overall, mood is a vital aspect of participantsâ behaviour on Spotify, and it seems that participants listen to music through the platform to manage or at least react to their moods. Yet the role of mood is normally implicit and unconscious in the participantsâ listening.
Having developed music streaming products myself, like Fonoteka, when I was at Zvooq, Iâm obviously very interested in this topic and what it means for the way we structure music experiences.
Another topic I love to think about is artificial intelligence, generative music, as well as adaptive and interactive music experiences. Particularly, Iâm interested at how non-static music experiences can be brought to a mass market. So when I saw the following finding (emphasis mine), things instantly clicked:
In the same way as we outsource some of our cognitive load to the computer (e.g. notes and reminders, calculators etc.) perhaps some of our emotional state could also be seen as being outsourced to the machine.
For the music industry, I think explicitly mood-based listening is an interesting, emerging consumption dynamic.
Mood augmentation is the best way for non-static music to reach a mass market
James is spot-on when he says mood-based listening is an emerging consumption dynamic. Taking a wider view: the way services construct music experiences also changes the way music is made.
The playlist economy is leading to longer albums, but also optimization of tracks to have lower skip rates in the first 30 seconds. This is nothing compared to the change music went through in the 20th century:
The proliferation of the record as the default way to listen to music meant that music became a consumer product. Something you could collect, like comic books, and something that could be manufactured at a steady flow. This reality gave music new characteristics:
Music became static by default: a song sounding exactly the same as all the times youâve heard it before is a relatively new quality.
Music became a receiving experience: music lost its default participative quality. If you wanted to hear your favourite song, you better be able to play it, or a friend or family member better have a nice voice.
Music became increasingly individual: while communal experiences, like concerts, raves and festivals flourished, music also went through individualization. People listen to music from their own devices, often through their headphones.
Personalized music is the next step
I like my favourite artist for different reasons than my friend does. I connect to it differently. I listen to it at different moments. Our experience is already different, so why should the music not be more personalized?
The gaming industry has figured out a different model: give people experience to the base game for free, and then charge them to unlock certain features. Examples of music apps that do this are Bjorkâs Biophilia as well as mixing app Pacemaker.
But itâs early days. And the real challenge in creating these experiences is that listeners donât know theyâre interested in them. As quoted earlier from James Lynden:
The role of mood is normally implicit and unconscious in the participantsâ listening.
The most successful apps for generative music and soundscapes so far, have been apps that generate sound to help you meditate or focus.
But as we seek to augment our human experience through nootropics and the implementation of technology to improve our senses, itâs clear that music as a static format no longer has to be default.
Keeping a close eye on the music space, I encounter a lot of startups and fledgling products. Unfortunately, a lot of them are misguided, for a variety of reasons, most of which can be prevented. Often, these early mistakes result in painful pivots or founding teams giving up, which is a real shame, as we need more applied innovation in the music business.
Here are the questions I wish music startup founders would ask themselves early on.
Does this work as a mainstream behaviour?
The biggest mistake music startup founders make is they assume that everyone loves music the way they do. Most people simply donât care that much about music. They like it, they love it, but in a very different way from whoeverâs likely to read thisâââlet alone found a music startup.
You need to be very critical of your idea. Itâs ok if it doesnât work for mainstream consumers, but then adjust expectations and target your product accordingly.
Does this work as a mainstream price point?
So letâs say you figure out you have the perfect lean-back experience for music listeners. Youâre creating something thatâs not demanding of its users and doesnât require big changes in existing behaviours. In other words: youâre ready to cater to a mainstream audience.
What about the price point? Price points are difficult to determine and people are notoriously bad at predicting what price theyâre willing to pay for something. If youâre going for a mainstream audience, your safest bet is pricing for impulse purchase decisions.
How does this work rights-wise in the long term?
You canât live on the APIs of YouTube, Soundcloud or Spotify forever. At some point, you need to build your own business. Do you understand the costs involved of licensing? Will content disappear from the service?
Launching light weight is fineâââif youâre looking to test an idea, using an API can be a great choice, but you need to understand your long term strategy, too, and plan for the next steps.
What are the ways in which people already solve this problem?
Changing an existing behaviour is hard work and takes commitment. Itâs risky to assume people will immediately fall in love with your product, drop everything, and never look back. Problems I see entrepreneurs frequently try to tackle are: staying up to date with your favourite artists, better ways to find new music, or giving people all their music in one place.
Are these problems consumers are already aware of? We all have our workarounds, so it may not seem urgent to your target users. Understand exactly how people are currently solving the problem, so that your product fits into a certain behavior and augments it, so that it becomes better.
Radically changing a behaviour is painful for users.
Do I really need to do a consumer-facing startup?
Sometimes entrepreneurs do music startups, because they have a vision for the music business and they want to break into it. Doing consumer facing startups is often costly and makes it trickier to gauge interest and test the market. If your goal is to create a better music landscape, perhaps you could consider solving problems within the music business.
After all, many of the imperfections that consumers have to deal with have a lot to do with problems in the music business internally.
