If you use Cymbal, you may have noticed a new kind of notification recently:
It’s a very simple idea: If you’ve ever shared a song by any artist before, we’ll send you a notification when that artist has a new song that hits our Top Songs chart — that’s the front page of the app.
This creates a kind of magical “first” experience you’ll otherwise only get hearing from your friends, or checking your preferred music blog at your regular interval. The advantage here, however, is that you’ll not only very likely hear about the song on Cymbal first, but you’ll be able to immediately enter into the live conversation about that song.
How fast are we? Well, let’s use Kendrick Lamar’s trending new song “HUMBLE.” as an example. Kendrick first tweeted about the song’s streaming availability on Apple Music at 11 PM EST on March 30th. He announced it on Spotify an hour later, at 12:03 AM EST. Not many music news sites share the exact minute posts are created, but some data points are available. Pitchfork first posted about the song at 11:03 EST. Fans of Kendrick got the song minutes later, by 11:07 PM EST, direct to their phones on Cymbal.
When Cymbal users open one of these push notifications up, lots of cool stuff happens. For example, almost half of all users who opened the “HUMBLE.” push then listened to the song on the app. That’s pretty tough to beat! Except we beat it the week before when Kendrick Lamar released “The Heart Pt. IV”. 73% of users who swiped that notification later listened to the song on the app. The lesson here: Nobody wants to be late on the songs that drive the public conversation, so it makes sense that this tool captures listeners as it does.
This all comes back to the central idea of Cymbal: Context gives music meaning. Songs that come from people you like, that define a moment, have the approval of the community that knows it best — Each of these personalizing elements strengthen a listener’s relationship to a song. First we could use your taste to define how significant each song is to you. Now we can use it to figure out how fast you learn about the music you’ll love.
