A Beggars Banquet for Lovin’ Apps
This week I was on a call — sorry, a Teams — when someone asked, “What’s better, a platform or a community?” I nodded and smiled for half an hour. Fessing up, I had no idea what he was talking about.
So, I did what I do. I stretched back and I hiccupped. And, I looked back on my unbusy day. I spent eleven hours listening to tinny, monophonic hard rock tunes from a Bygone era playlist on Spotify trying to suss what Pete was trying to tell me. After air-guitaring my way through: All Right Now, The 2009 Remastered Brown Sugar, the original Jumpin’ Jack Flash, American Woman, and hitting skip on Sweet Emotion — because Aerosmith, argh — it hit me.
Social media may seem like the world’s biggest bathroom wall. I would like to say we sh1tp0st not far where we ____ — well, you know. But I can’t say that because it would be off-brand for me. So, instead, I’ll say it this way. We show up and scribble whatever is on our mind in indelible ink alongside so many other posts that it starts to look like a Lichtenstein pop art tapestry.
In its cleansed form it may look like a hand-calligraphed wedding invite. But it’s so much more. Raw, it's a veritable beggar’s banquet of insights into our individual and collective psyche.
Rivaling Meatloaf’s Bat of Hell 1m55s of preamble for a hellishly long intro, here, after 237 words, we get to the point of this story.
Gather ‘round kids. Once upon a time, there was a steaming music app and it was a scientific wonder. It was based on the fully mapped music genome.
Yeah, song scientists mapped the DNA of diddies like the way medical scientists mapped the DNA of people. Experts analyzed thousands of songs across 450 dimensions. Rock and Pop have 150 genes. They’re like the Carsonella ruddi, a bacteria with only 160,000 genes. Rap songs have 350. Jazz about 400. World and classical music have up to 450. Each gene is scored from 0 to 5 with halves allowed. I would have just used a 1 to 10 scale, but, then, I’m not a music scientist.
Suffice to say, smarts were baked into the app’s DNA. So much so that its matching algorithm was unparalleled. In the early days of music streaming, the app dominated. Back in 2016, more than half (54%) of people who streamed music on an app used this app.
Today Pandora has lost more than half its users and has 16% market share. The genius app is Pandora by the way. Ask people under the age of 30 if they’ve heard of Pandora. Chances are, they haven’t.
Why did Spotify pass Pandora in 2020? Reading things like this, you might believe it was because of things like partnerships or podcasts. I don’t buy it. I think it’s because Spotify made it easy to create, play, and share playlists.
Don’t take my word for it. ErickPandora said it like this, “Spotify… lets you create and curate your own playlists, browse through a vast library of songs, and discover new tunes based on your existing preferences.” Erick is a Community Manager at… Pandora. He posted this Nearly two years ago on Pandora’s Community site. Say it again for the folks in the back… A Pandora Community Manager. At Pandora’s. Community. Site. Said, playlists.
There’s always a breakthrough that crowns a winner in a new category. Spotify leveraged playlists. Which is another way to say they leveraged people. I like certain songs. I put my the songs I like somewhere. Other people like my musical choices more than they like a machine that picks things. Plus, if I were given to care about such things, I would promote my playlists on other platforms (if I used any) and to my friends (if I had any) and watch my phone vibrate incessantly as it notifies me about all my new subscribers and likes. A machine doesn’t promote anything. Because, unlike people, machines don’t care.
By the time Spotify had streamed unskippable songs by: Steppenwolf, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Van Halen, George Thorogood & The Destroyers, CCR, and Deep Purple, I paused.
#UnskippableSongs. I remembered the origins of the hashtag. Sure, Jack Dorsey designed Twitter on a cocktail napkin. His enthusiastic community brought the curation mechanisms. Chris Messina invented the hashtag to organize content.
On a platform an algorithm prioritizes content for me. In a community, people in the community curate content for me. If your app-lovin’ community cares enough and your app makes the curation method easy enough, you can dominate a market.
Clearly, communities are better than platforms. Build a community.
