Tag: video

The value of piracy: future back thinking

Posted on | by Maarten Walraven-Freeling

We don’t talk a lot about piracy in the music industry anymore, but it still exists. In 2018, more than a third of music consumers still pirated music. In 2020, INCOPRO, on behalf of the UK’s PRS for Music, showed that piracy in the form of stream-ripping grew by almost 1400% between 2016 and 2019. The question is how to analyse this activity, how to analyse the pirates, and how to determine the effect and impact of piracy on the current state of the music industry.

How piracy has changed

Back in 1999, when everybody I knew used Napster and Kazaa, piracy involved quite elaborate peer-to-peer networks. The music I hosted, for example, would be shared and downloaded by others through those networks and vice versa. Nowadays, the main act of piracy comes through ‘stream-ripping’ which is most common from YouTube streams, but also happens from streaming services such as Spotify or Deezer. In 2019 MusicWatch published researched into ‘stream-ripping’ showcasing growth of the phenomenon. The two main reasons provided are: 1) being able to listen to songs offline; 2) liking a certain song, but not enough to buy it.

Both of those main reasons are exactly why streaming services displaced widespread illegal sharing and downloading of music. They provide ease-of-access and in paid tiers offline listening is available. Moreover, back around 2014, just before recorded music growth kicked back in, MBW wrote how amazing it was that piracy had dropped almost completely, giving the example of Norway as a country with an early high adoption rate of streaming services.

That third reason highlighted on the infographic is actually the more interesting one: random searches for music lead people to apps and websites that allow them to rip streams illegally into MP3 files. This signals a broader issue then a simple narrative of ‘bad pirates.’

The Ethnographic approach

Considering the financial impact of piracy on the recorded music industry it’s no surprise there is a vast body of empirical, academic research into it. A paper from Steven Caldwell Brown from 2016 aimed to make sense of how people engaged with and defined music piracy. This built on the work of many others who had previously shown how illegal downloaders also spent the most money on music. One example comes from a cross-cultural research by Joe Karaganis and Lennart Renkema and published in 2011. In their ‘Copy Culture in the US and Germany‘ they showed that those who spend more on music were also those who downloaded the most illegal music files. There’s a question whether that value that these file-sharing pirates placed on music is now captured by the likes of Spotify. If you previously downloaded illegal music files but also spent $100 on recorded music each month but switched to a Spotify paid account right when they launched it’s only now, after 12 years, that you will have matched your previous yearly spend on music.

It’s not just music

Outside of the music industry, piracy also played its role. Again, streaming services, such as Netflix or Amazon Prime Video, provided an ease-of-access and affordable way to access lots of content bringing piracy numbers down. However, the competitive model in video is much stronger than in music. There’s more focus on originals, differentiation of content, and exclusive deals. Take, for example, Batman Begins & The Dark Knight and imagine that happening to a major artist’s records.

The difficult thing is that with our audio streaming services we expect everything to be available. If that’s not the case, there’s a fear listeners will start downloading again. But that’s not necessarily a bad thing when those who pirate are also those who consume the most. Recent research by Omdia shows that even now pirates are just ‘content hungry.’

So why do these pirates pirate? Because they have reached a maximum they can spend on various streaming services per month or because they cannot find a specific title through legal services. In the video world, both of these reasons are fair enough. In music, they don’t hold up. Basically all music is available on each major streaming service. With a subscription to one of these you get access to all of that music.

The future back thinking we need

The problem with piracy isn’t a problem with pirates. In the music industry, those who traditionally pirate the most music files are those who, in terms of spend, value music the most. What we see in the video business is a big phase of unbundling: multiple subscription-video-on-demand services, cable TV operators, free-ad-supported-streaming TV, etc. In the music business, we have an era of the bundle: buy-one-get-all-music-ever. Those artists who lean into the creator and passion economies try to differentiate their income streams and escape the bundle. This differentiation is necessary because for the vast majority of artists the bundled streaming service system doesn’t offer a good valuation of their art. Due to the increased competition surrounding video, creators are better valued. Perhaps, then, piracy is a necessary evil in a system that better values the art created?

What the End of the App Era Means for the Music Business

Posted on | by Bas Grasmayer

The average smartphone user downloads less than 1 app per month, according to comScore. The era of apps is ending, and we’re moving in an era of artificial intelligence interacting with us through messaging apps, chatbots, voice-controlled interfaces, and smart devices.

What happens to music in this context? How do you make sure your music stands out? How do you communicate your brand when the interface goes from visual to conversational? And what strategic opportunities and challenges does the conversational interface present to streaming services?

 

The Instagram Stories rulebook (and 20 creative ideas for your short form videos)

Posted on | by Bas Grasmayer

Instagram Stories are the most important development in social media right now. I’ve previously explained why, but the key point is that the short format expiring content makes it fun to create, share, and engage with people who share their moments.

My two articles about Instagram Stories had loads of people getting in touch, following me, and sharing their own strategies. I’m also delighted that I inspired some to take the medium more seriously and get to work on it. In this article I want to go a little deeper to help you achieve more success through it.

Defining success on Instagram Stories

Everyone has their personal goals for social media. I do it just for fun, to keep friends engaged, and to keep my network connected by staying top of mind. I have varying reasons for posting individual story items, but there’s always a bigger picture.

Let’s define success by exploring what failure looks like.

Failure is when you post such low quality or inconsistent items that your audience stops caring. Maybe they mute your story to stop it from appearing at the top. Maybe they stop tapping your name, which causes Instagram to put you towards the end of the top bar. Being inconsistent, low quality, or plain boring will result in a loss of viewership over time.

So, this implies that success means you have a captive audience. An audience that checks in at least every 24 hours, over a long period of time.

Success metrics

  • Time between sharing & viewing: do people check in once a day, or does a large proportion view your stories within the first hour of posting? The latter could imply stronger engagement.
  • Average daily viewers: this should grow over time if you’re doing well. Could also check average viewers per story.
  • Direct replies: are people responding and sending messages in response to your stories?
  • Conversion: location-tagging and adding hashtags to stories exposes your stories to wider audiences — do they end up following you and becoming long-term viewers?

A general rule book for Instagram Stories

I don’t really like rules, but I see some typical behaviour that just doesn’t work, so I need to draw the line. It’s pretty easy to make good engaging content, and pretty easy to avoid making dull content. So let’s do this. 💪

  1. ‘Never’ repost stuff you’ve already posted as normal Instagram photos to Stories.
    People will have seen it. Instagram Stories is not for old content. Stories is for fresh content. The other way around is fine: save your Stories to your camera roll, and then repost it as an Instagram post a day later. Not all your Instagram followers see your Stories, but nearly everyone who watches your Stories will also see your Instagram posts.
  2. Focus on keywords, not long texts.
    Text should be no longer than maybe a sentence. If it’s a sentence, make sure to use good keywords, so people get what you’re saying in the blink of an eye without actually having to read it. People flick through stories fast, so if you’re posting any text longer than that you are posting useless content.
  3. Video > boomerang > static images.
    In terms of what’s interesting content, video usually wins. It’s the most engaging, gives the most information, the most emotion. Uninspired boomerangs are pretty dull, so get creative. The reason why I put boomerangs at this step in the content hierarchy is because Instagram seems to favour them in Explore feeds when you’re location-tagging and hashtagging stuff.
  4. Tag your stories!
    It gives another dimension to your stories, so people can check out the location, what else is in the hashtag, or the person you’re talking about… but it also exposes your content in the Explore tab. This can easily triple or quadruple any individual story item’s audience.
  5. Keep it personal & regular.
    When you follow someone who regularly posts stuff, multiple times a day, you really get a feeling of connection. So that’s what you should be doing. Involve people in the part of your life that you don’t mind sharing. If you’re a musician or band, forget the same old shots of the audience at your gig or the “so excited about this new release” screenshots. Explain why you’re excited by talking into the camera, give people previews, take people backstage, show your journey towards a gig in the weeks leading up, and then on the day itself. Tell the story!
  6. Follow other people’s stories.
    The easiest way to get Stories wrong is by not understanding what they’re for. Check other people’s stories at least once a day! Pay attention to what’s interesting and what’s boring to you. This is something that will change with more long-term engagement, so make it part of your daily media habit if you want to take this medium seriously.
  7. Get creative.
    Repetitive content is what kills long-term engagement. So be creative.

20 creative ideas for Instagram Stories

I’m constantly thinking about what I can be posting, and drawing loads of inspiration from the people I follow. Here are my favourites.

Music

Music builds connection.

1. Take a video with music playing from your phone’s speakers. It captures the audio really well, and sometimes the best annotation for a view or moment is a song.

2. Take a screenshot of something that’s playing. Sounds dull, but if you’re posting a couple of items per day, it will blend in well. The screenshot makes sure people who have their audio disabled will understand what you’re sharing. A phone’s lock screen screenshot will also tell people things like the time of day, and whether you love living on the edge and riding that final 2-3% of your battery.

3. Take a video of a music video. I’ll get back to this further in the list, but sharing small clips by filming a YouTube clip on your laptop is surprisingly engaging… just make sure it’s interesting and not a video that everyone has already seen recently: unless for some reason the fact that you’re watching it is interesting or funny.

4. Use other music sharing apps. Some apps allow you to export small music clips, like Sounds, you can consider using them. But beware: super-polished content will feel like ads and is not very engaging.

Filters

Instagram has some basic photo filters you can use, which you can activate when taking a selfie (e.g. the virtual masks that stick to your face as you talk).

5. Get creative with filters. They’re there to make it easier to make fun or quirky content.

6. Use Snapchat filters, but post on Instagram. Snapchat has the best filters, and they regularly update them, adding new ones. You don’t have to post on Snapchat, just save the Snapchat Story to your device and then import it to Instagram.

7. Use filters in ways they weren’t intended. Faceswap with paintings, apply face filters to people on TV… get creative.

Surroundings

Your surroundings are more interesting than you may think… and there’s more waiting for you to find once you start looking for it. You should be documenting what you see and what piques your interest.

8. Street art and graffiti. Particularly stuff in original places.

9. Nature, grass, and parks. When people check Instagram Stories, they’re likely to be inside… so why not bring them outside? I personally really prefer film over static shots here, because you can capture wind, rain, animals, movement, and sound, and really share that special moment.

10. Going somewhere? Do a timelapse. The iPhone’s default camera app has a timelapse function, and if Android phones don’t have this, I’m sure there are apps for it. Hold your phone in front of your body while you’re walking and convert that 3 minute walk from the metro to the office into a 10 second clip.

11. Friends and people. Netflix founder Reed Hastings once answered that the most consistent thing they see in their data is that people really like stories about people. So bring some humanity into your stories and make it about more than yourself.

Pin text and emoji

If you put text or emoji into your stories, you can pin it to stay attached to a certain item in your video. You can have loads of fun with this.

12. Attach a surfer to the soap in your bath or sink. You can do this before taking a bath or doing the dishes. If you have some foamy soap, run your hand through the water and move it around while filming. Then attach emoji to the foam floating on the water.

13. Zoom in to pinned text. If you are doing a story with a lot of zooming, you can tag text to something you zoom in on. At the start of your story, the text may be barely noticeable until it’s fully zoomed in. Works with emoji too.

Use creative photography or video apps

Here’s two I like:

14. The Pantone app lets you tag certain colours. It’s a pretty nice way to highlight colours in your environment and share to Instagram.

15. Hyperspektiv lets you distort your reality. A very trippy app that lets you make interesting glitchy and psychedelic videos. Powerful, so you can spend hours inside the app, making all kinds of interesting content.

What are you doing?

Share what you’re doing.

16. Watching a music video.

17. Watching a documentary, TV show, or interesting movie.

18. Going to a concert or another type of public performance.

19. Flicking through an art book or going to a museum.

20. The fish tank in your local Chinese restaurant.

Just don’t overdo it: make sure content is not too similar.

21. Food? It’s a cliché, but if you’re able to take a good picture of your food, you can share it occasionally. But keep in mind that it’s usually not the food that’s important: it’s the moment. Involve people in your narrative. A plain beer is boring: a beer after a hard day of work is already more interesting. Capture the moment.

 

Hope this helps you up your content game. And if you’re wondering about how I’m doing it on Instagram (despite not necessarily being the best example), follow me: @basgras

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.

Jazzy Jeff & The Fresh Prince

Like MC and DJ: an audiovisual alliance for the digital age

Posted on | by Bas Grasmayer

The digital age is demanding for artists. Simply releasing audio is often not enough. You have to take care of artwork, video material for Instagram, YouTube, and Facebook, and then you still have to figure out how to get people to actually pay you.

The time has come for a new band member – even if you’re just a bedroom producer. That band member is the visual artist.

The case I’m making is not new. It has happened before. On a tremendous scale. Back in the early days of hiphop, DJs needed MCs to hype up the crowd. As MCs moved center stage, they needed DJs to keep their shows dynamic, so these two different disciplines combined and allied. It was necessary for the format of that day.

Jazzy Jeff & Will Smith / Fresh Prince
DJ Jazzy Jeff & The Fresh Prince: “He’s the DJ, I’m the rapper!“

The format of this day is audiovisual. It needs to compete in feeds, it needs to stop people from scrolling, and has to get them to unmute the video in order to hear your music.

Like the DJ and MC in the 1980s, the musician and the visual artist face similar problems today:

  • You need to get your work in front of people’s eyes;
  • And, outside of certain well-established business models, it’s challenging to monetize.

For the visual artist, you are usually the client, not the people who watch the final work. So they’re used to be commissioned to create their art. It’s you who monetizes the live performance and the recording. Teaming up creates the possibility to do both, together, like for brands.

Advantage #1: combining business models generates new revenue streams for the musician and the visual artist.

But before the business model comes getting your work under a lot of eyes. That requires honing your skills plus defining and refining your style. This can be challenging by yourself, but in partnership you can work off of each other. Instead of stepping in when a big part of the creative product is already finished, the visual artist can be involved in the creative process from the beginning. This has the effect that the music and video are integrated elements of the same work, rather than two separate works, and over time, the symbiosis between the artists develops further.

Advantage #2: music and video are interwoven elements, rather than separate works made at different points in time.

Advantage #3: the creative product is a new container uniquely suited for, and born out of, the digital landscape.

The song, as we know it, came from the record. We’re still thinking in songs, but it has lost its novelty as a format. While audio-only music is obviously not going anywhere, the most engaging material on social networks right now is video. Moving image is powerful — it took a while for video to take over the web, but with growing data caps, increasing network speeds, and great cameras and screens on our mobile devices, video has finally conquered the web.

What is also not going away is the live experience. In fact, it’s one of the most important revenue sources. Engaging live shows are hard if you’re a solo musician. If you’re a band, they’re tricky in terms of logistics, and possibly costly.

If you can do a live show with just 1 or 2 people the economics are much better. Bringing not just your own music, but also your own visuals that extend from the experience you provide on your site, your album artwork, and your audiovisual experiences on YouTube, Instagram, and other social media.

You should actually be able to charge a bit more for your bookings, because of this show element.

Advantage #4: the economics for live are better, and you get to offer a very integrated experience to fans.

Advantage #5: it gives a live, real-world experience to the visuals — which is something that may be trickier to achieve if the visual artist were on their own.

For some good examples of artist collectives who strongly emphasise this audiovisual fusion, check out NAAFI, ZZK Records, NON, and Meneo:

Music for the Snapchat generation: conceptualizing Music Stories

Posted on | by Bas Grasmayer

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.

Forbes launched Cards, Huffington Post launched storybooks, and Medium launched Series. This led David Emery, VP Global Marketing Strategy of Kobalt Label Services, to ask the question: what will the Snapchat for music look like?

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’. Snapchat’s 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. Tinder’s 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.

Soundcloud’s feed is a good example, but so is Snapchat’s 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.  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. Tinder’s 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. Tinder’s 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.

(Don’t forget to read David Emery’s original post, which prompted me to write this piece)