Building Attention-Holding Habits — Gaming Industry Lessons for the Music Biz #2

hearthstone

The currency of the web is attention. Not because so much of the web is ad-funded, but because attention is its scarcest good and the first step towards monetization. In the networked age, the basis of success in music is the ability to grab people’s attention and hold it.

The digital masters of holding attention? Game designers, who tap into the most effective strategy for holding attention: building habits.

Dailies

Many games have concepts of daily resetting quests that will reward the user for completing the quest every day. It may be as simple as just logging in, or it might give you a specific task. Fitness apps employ this concept, too. As does Seinfeld.

💡 If you run a service or have a fanbase, consider: with what frequency do you want people to engage with you? How do you get them to return to you with that frequency?

Progress and completion

Classic video games employ the concept of ‘levels’ to give people a sense of progress and completion. Nowadays, in the age of more open-ended games, completion is often indicated in absolute numbers (eg. quests completed) or percentages (eg. amount of world explored). We hate leaving things unfinished and game designers are not alone in knowing this. Companies like Facebook and LinkedIn are using completeness to encourage people to add more information or perform specific tasks.

LinkedIn profile completeness

You can combine completion with dailies, making it necessary to perform dailies in order to get to completion.

💡 Help fans visualize how much of your music collection they’ve already listened to, or bought. Adding a buy button to missing releases will drive sales. Imagine rewards for people with certain levels of completion. What can you do for people who’ve completed all dailies within a certain time period?

Expiring goods and content

Another easy way to get people to come back is by adding expiring content. This could come in the form of points or leaderboards that reset each week, certain virtual goods that can only be bought or won for a certain duration, or alternative rule sets that are only available for a limited time. This is an area the music business has traditionally been good at, from flash merch sales, to ‘early bird’ ticketing schemes. There’s a big difference though: in games, expiring goods exist to drive habit-forming behaviour, so that people get hooked. The way you need to think about it is as designing someone’s experience, rather than simple tricks to extract money from them.

Two music examples
Main Course, a label specialising in underground dance music, lets people download new releases for free from their Soundcloud within the first week of release. After that, you can only purchase them through stores like Beatport or you have to go through the inconvenience of piracy. Result: people will check their Soundcloud at least once a week.

Spotify has also managed to get people to shape habits around expiring content: the Spotify Weekly playlist of songs specially recommended for you. They see upticks in traffic on Monday, when it’s pushed to all users, and on Sunday when users save music they discovered to new playlists before the playlist expires.

💡 How can you excite your fans or users with expiring goods? How can you utilize expiring content to drive behaviours and relationships that last?

Experiment

Play around and try new things. See what happens. If you get interesting results, get in touch and I’ll help you spread the word more widely.


Written for my weekly newsletter MUSIC x TECH x FUTURE. If you enjoyed reading this, please consider sharing and subscribing.

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Gaming Industry Lessons for the Music Biz #1: Season Pass Subscriptions

If you want to know the future of music, look at the gaming business. They got into the same mess at the same time, but have found incredible ways to deal with today’s networked reality. I’ll be exploring successful concepts from the gaming industry and explaining how they can be applied to music. Starting off with the Season Pass.

What’s a Season Pass in gaming?

By default, most gamers now play games from ‘connected devices’ meaning smartphones, PCs or consoles with an internet connection. This has made iteasier, and more lucrative, for gaming companies to ship updates and expansions. During the game’s creation process, the companies around it will talk about what the game is going to include and what the ideas for future expansions are. These expansions are sold on a per-piece basis with varying prices although they mostly fall in the $10-40 range.

Fallout 4 Season Pass

A Season Pass will get you all of the expansions for a fixed price. Pre-ordering the game, prior to release, might get you a Season Pass included in the standard price of the game. Buying a Season Pass before the first expansion comes out might only cost $20, whereas the planned expansions will total $80. Buying a Season Pass later will cost you $40, etc. Prices here are made-up, but have a look at the Steam store if you want to get a sense of price points. Notable examples of games using this strategy are Fallout 4 and the Call of Duty series.

How can a Season Pass be applied to music?

Game studios realize that games are never finished. For one, they may contain bugs, however they’ve also realized that selling expansions to a popular game is more lucrative than creating a completely new game.

I am not sure if he’s the first to do so, but Kanye has adopted a similar strategy with his newest album. Kanye’s label, Def Jam:

An innovative, continuous process, the album will be a living, evolving art project.

Works of music or art no longer need to be static or finished, they may be updated and expanded. This creates new opportunities for a lot of players in the digital ecosystem.

Music streaming services
Let’s look at some of the potential models. You can have all the music you want, ad-supported, or for a premium, but if you want to access the latest updates to releases you should:

  • Buy a Season Pass on a per-release basis
  • Buy a Season Pass on an per-artist basis (this probably ties in best with the current ‘follow’ functionality on Spotify, Apple Music / Connect and other services)
  • Buy a Season Pass on a per-label basis (probably too abstract for most music consumers)
  • Buy a global Season Pass at an extra premium, allowing you to accessall updated releases

Direct-to-fan
More interesting are the opportunities this gives artists to directly connect with and monetize their audience. You could release an album inside your own artist / fan club app and then:

  • Make it free for all fans
  • Let fans buy a Season Pass to be able to hear updates or expansions
  • Free Season Pass included for those who buy physical copies, like vinyl, or merch
  • Let the top fans hear new versions for free, or ahead of the official updates
  • Give Season Pass holders discounts on merch
  • Involve Season Pass holders in the creation process — perhaps give them ways to influence your decision-making

The list could go on and on.

I’m very eager to see responses to this article. Let’s see you come up with some cool examples of applying the Season Pass to the music business!


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