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Challenge
Povilas S May 31, 2022
Find a way to make musical social media apps successful
Image credit: https://minter.io/blog/25-music-sources-for-your-social-media-content/
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So far the efforts by various startups and even world-famous companies to combine music streaming and social media features, to create a platform where people could discover music through people and people through music, share, comment on, like, etc. exclusively musical content failed. Examples: Ping, Cymbal, Connect, there are many more.
The demand for successful musical social media is obvious – people love to share music, love to discover music and one of the main things that connect people is music.
What is the main obstacle preventing such apps from becoming successful and how can it be overcome?
Things to note:
Platforms like Youtube, SoundCloud, and Spotify all have some features of social media, but none of them are truly a music-oriented social media platform. Picture something like Instagram is for images, just for music.
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Creative contributions
Feedback, engagement on-page, and identity
All of these apps were started while Facebook was still strong and people shared music there a lot. Now, with Facebook getting passed on to older generations, there might be room for such a music social media app.
- Feedback - we all sent someone a music link only to see them write "I'll check it later" and get no return information. Or to post the song to FB or Twitter and get likes mostly from the people who know the song from before and are just liking to signal they like it too. So how about if the app has the ability to let you know who did listen to the whole track you shared, who left after 15 seconds, and who left mid-way. But also for whom it was the first time they heard the track. On that platform at least. You're not shooting into the void anymore. If they then start listening to that artist a lot, after a while you'd get a notification like "You turned Povilas into a Blue Oyster Cult cult member - he listened to XX hours of them in the last month". That would be satisfying. It would be a conversation starter.
- Overlap - Also have a notification if you and your contact happen to listen to the same song at the roughly same time. Or have listened to five songs from different albums in the same day.
I think Soundcloud was somewhat of a social media app, yet they never kicked off in that aspect because of several issues.
- Their design provided little in terms of content that isn't music. It's mostly recommendations for other artists - content that would interfere with the music you're already listening. No added content to keep you on the page, to keep you engaged. So instead at this new platform, while you're listening, you'd get a slideshow of the photos of the artist if the song is not a music video. Or have the option to see the lyrics in real-time, or to see them explained like on Genius. Lyric explanations then also serve as conversation starters. What else can be engaging while you listen? Quizzes? Having a music map of the artist?
- Soundcloud also suffered from the anonymity of users, that is that most names and avatars are forum names, which isn't the case for most social media accounts. You have some indication of who the person is. So having identity confirmation could help a lot.
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Interactive features to improve collaborative playlists on music streaming platforms
Collaborative playlists are a great social feature available on music streaming platforms. However, they have very limited possibilities and lack some basic functions that could greatly improve the experience for those who use them and make them more desirable for those who don't. This is one of the ways to start bridging the gap between music streaming platforms and social media.
I propose to implement these features that are currently lacking:
- Notify each collaborator every time someone adds a new song to the playlist.
- Possibility to like and comment on songs added to the playlist (each collaborator gets notified of all the reactions and comments).
- Live chat on the sidebar - you can see which collaborators are currently connected and chat with them about the music in the playlist.
- Once you open the collaborative playlist you can also see if any of the collaborators currently listen to certain songs in it (similarly to Spotify's "what friends are currently listening to" feature, just bound to that particular playlist and its collaborators).
With those features in place, people could form certain social groups revolving around music that they share with each other. They could enjoy it together and talk about it.
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Add your creative contribution
General comments
Marco Agudelo10 months ago
watch this video, it could bring out some ideas.
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Marco Agudeloa year ago
Music seems to be transverse to time. It follows us side by side as if it requires a complementary activity. If it's solved why isolate it, it could get closer to the main obstacle question.
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Marco Agudelo10 months ago
Povilas S Yes I mean people can enjoy listening to music as an activity. In spanish these people are called “melómanos” which google traductor, translate it as “music lovers” but I guess is more a spanish word thing.
Take for example this song about the four rhythms of vallenato . Is a song created for the fifty year of an important local festival related to tribute to this traditional folk. It is a song for listening to and used to introduce to new audiences to listen to the concept of how the vallenato varies in its own gender. I wouldn’t be an expert to explain it but if your coursious enough you may find references about it.
Please recall, from the beginning I acknowledge the complexity of your challenge about figuring out what prevents musical media apps from becoming successful and second, how can it be overcome. So my comment about isolating the music concept itself, ¿why would a person isolate music from the activity related to it? And in a way the philosophic concept of music to humans rather than the concept of music in human activities, maybe this route can offer tools to figure out your challenge. I’m not sure that by creating social activities around the music would be enough. I mean, why would a person spend time on social media about the music used in their activities? That would be too much effort for a continuous activity? Think about it, when traveling in the car, when working, when doing exercise, when parting, at restaurants… etc the list is endless.
Inspired on Miloš Stanković creative contribution and your interactive feature contribution, I would propose a feature that enables to follow someone’s real time reproduction, through their mobiles with speaker or headphones, without losing synchronization due to the distance to the user’s source, in a way that can be “propagated” an evolutionary party and create a sense of collectivity from nothing to crowd based capacity. ¿Would you imagine how music will sound through a bunch of different mobiles brands, all at full level, all people dancing, with mobiles raised on their hands? Picture your best song or mixtape in this scenario! I’m not sure you will stop and chat about it, but for sure you will live it socially.
One final comment about how immerse music is into living self activities. Think about the rhythm your body creates when walking, not about listening to music while walking, but the rhythm created with your body to foot cadence. Will music social media target this situation as well? What do you think?
[1]LOS CUATRO AIRES DEL VALLENATO, Canción oficial de los 50 años del festival Vallenato, 2017. https://youtu.be/ZGravTkregw
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Povilas S10 months ago
Marco Agudelo Sorry, could you rephrase what you mean? I didn't quite understand it
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Marco Agudelo10 months ago
Povilas S Sure, I just corrected the last paragraph too.
One of the properties of something being transverse to another is the capacity of having the same value to infinite different values of the thing to what it is transverse, and also is possible to have only one possible solution (but of course not both at the same time). And by integrating two or more transverse groups it could generate a new thing that expresses the relations of the individual parts. About music being transverse to time my idea was that the same song could be used to multiple situations to multiple persons, each in a diverse way, unique to every one of us. Sounds in a coherence manner (said music) is present in daily basics, in the rhythm while walking, in using a tool, on playing an instrument, etc.
The obstacle question I referred to is as you posted on the challenge, ¿what is “preventing such apps from becoming successful”?. So what I was suggesting is to analyze if by isolating music of -human time to spend it in music- maybe it could offer an approach to the challenge.