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

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?

 

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

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?

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”

How to get me to talk about your startup

Tips for pitching newsletter curators. 

1.5 year ago, I started my newsletter to encourage more innovation in music. It has allowed me to shine a spotlight on people, startups, and music companies that are doing fascinating things. I’m really flattered that so many people have signed on and always have something positive to say.

However, I’m not a journalist, and it was never my aim to set up my newsletter as a journalistic medium. My day job as Product Director of IDAGIO, where we’re reinventing streaming for classical music, has me so occupied that it’s often hard to find enough time to put out my newsletter. Many weeks, I get up a few hours early on Monday morning to make sure I get the newsletter done before work starts. I wouldn’t have it any other way: I love what I’m doing.

This means that the typical way you’d approach a journalist really doesn’t work for me.

Don’t send me press releases

Press releases have annoying structures to read and you never really learn much more than what could fit into a tweet. I could never really be bothered with reading them, but now that I’m busier, it really takes some strong willpower to read it. I can only muster that willpower for:

  • Friends / acquaintances;
  • Companies I follow because I love what they’re doing;
  • Bizarre / unique / remarkable announcements.

Nearly no announcement falls into that last category.

Secondly, press releases don’t correspond with the format of articles I do, so it’s a nightmare to incorporate a press release announcement into an article, and I definitely won’t like a press release from my newsletter (with some very rare exceptions).

Don’t pitch curators with press releases.

Don’t let your publicist do the work

This may work for some journalistic publications, but I’m trying to do something different, so I prefer to hear straight from a founder, product person, or someone who’s involved in strategic decision-making.

I try my best to make my newsletter inspiring, thoughtful, and something that people can learn from… PR statements that are signed off on rarely correspond with those criteria.

Oh, and by the way: if you’re working with an agency, check in with them every now and then. There’s one that has been particularly persistent in sending press releases to me, even after I asked him to stop because I’m not interested in the startup’s domain (and he said he would). Then he resumed 2 months later, and just keeps spamming. This does not make me think better about your startup, and kind of makes me want to avoid you altogether, because I don’t feel like dealing with a pushy company culture.

Do write about what you’re doing

The BEST way to get into my newsletter is by writing an article about what you’re doing. However, it can’t be a press release or an announcement, it has to be something like a Medium post that people can learn from. Here are some examples:

These are valuable to my readers, and they’re valuable to me.

Simply: make sure people can learn something from what you’re doing. Don’t sell too hard.

Do get in touch with me directly

Back when I was still doing MUSIC x TECH X FUTURE full-time, I opened all communication channels, including a message for new subscribers to my email to tell me what they’re up to. I also highly encourage replies to my newsletters with feedback, since it guides me in my decision making for upcoming weeks. I also love a good conversation or thought-provoking comment, despite not having as much time to engage with everything anymore.

(by the way, if you want to strike up an interesting conversation, you can also jump into the community: MxTxF Backstage — no self-promo please :)).

I try to reply to every email I get… if I don’t, it’s often because I saw your email, considered it important to get a proper response, saved it for later, and then forgot… so don’t be shy & send a reminder.

One thing I don’t really have much time for nowadays is doing Skype calls. I don’t really enjoy calling, and they really cut into my free time, since I have to make arrangements to be at home. I go to a lot of events (next up: BIME & Slush Music + Slush), so catch me at one of those if you’d like to chat in person — and please don’t turn that meeting into a sales pitch.

Do everything you can to make it really easy for me to include you

Make a Medium post. Make sure it’s well-written. Familiarize yourself with the newsletter, what I write about, and what I’ve written about before. Make sure your post fits well into this context. And send it over with a brief intro.

The things I look for are:

  1. Does this introduce a new perspective?
  2. Can my readers learn from this?
  3. Have I read something like this before?
  4. Does this have an innovative angle?
  5. Is this something I would write about?

I consider #5 even when just featuring someone else’s writing in my newsletter.

Who I write about

I write about the people that are top of mind. People I run into in conferences a lot. People that have been long-time followers of my newsletters. Companies that I think are innovative and doing interesting things.

It’s rare that I will immediately write about something I discover. In many cases, I’ll be following something for many months before I write about it. This has a lot to do with my writing process.

If I get up at 5.30 in the morning on Monday and start writing, I’m going to write about what’s top of mind. I’m going to use examples to explain topics that are top of mind. The things that are top of mind are things I feel strongly about; things that I either love or hate (and I don’t write about the latter, because I want the newsletter to be uplifting and motivating — no time to deal with what we don’t like, when we can achieve so much success by focusing on the positive).

Concluding

All in all, it’s pretty simple: write something that I can easily feature, get in touch directly over email or Twitter, and make sure it’s something people on my newsletter will learn from.

This goes for every newsletter out there, and for every conference curator too by the way.

READ MORE: Moving up the music curation food chain

Oh, and one more thing, since I realized I may be opening some content floodgates here: make sure your writing is timely and timeless. I only put 10 links into each newsletter (3 per category + 1 fun link). If your piece gets outdated 1 or 2 weeks later, I’ll never be able to feature it. Even then: if I think most of the newsletter subscribers will have read it already, I tend not to feature. Tough choices.

I love hearing about innovation in music & love being part of this community.

Keep me up to date!