Bill-bored: Digital music platforms are without heart

MAKE ME FEEL SOMETHING

With digital comes data. But platforms have yet to use it in ways that bring new value to the listening experience. How has Apple — who’s software ecosystem is intimately intertwined with our day-to-day lives — not yet connected our calendars, random marathon catch-up phone calls and mapped road-trips into storytelling moments that deepen the emotional connection we have with the music we listen to? If an eyewear company can make their annual report go viral, there is definitely an opportunity to get creative with how we storify data. Even Facebook now “shares a memory” with us. So what if Apple Music produced personalized ‘annual reports’ that were customized soundtracks of our year, instantly re-connecting us to how we felt at that moment in time?

Music is personal. Our moods often dictate our choice of playlist. There’s information connected to our choices. Human thought and activity are data inputs. But without an equally human analysis and objectives, data is engineered to be rational, efficient and transactional. Spotify has successfully used data to the opposite end. Through their proprietary “Discover Weekly”, subscribers are fed a weekly personalized playlist as if someone hand-delivered a curated mix tape — except the songs are selected by an algorithm. This simple feature heightens the emotional experience by making it feel like the songs and artist chose you rather than the other way around. You can imagine how listeners are willing to pay for these types of personalized services.

Music has always been a proxy to express our emotions, but digital platforms have done little to integrate these expressions into the user experience.

Pharrell’s infectious single “Happy” inspired thousands around the globe to share in and spread the song’s message by creating and uploading their own music videos. The collective experience brought people closer and connected them to a universal message of positivity. In Iran, the song inspired a young group of dancers to choreograph their own video. They were subsequently arrested for violating that country’s Islamic laws, which brought awareness to larger social injustices that continue to plague populations around the world. The actions the song spurred could have been made discoverable through an entirely new kind of people-driven categorization. For example: “songs that rile us up for change” — perhaps even connecting our purchase to an organization working to affect that very change. When we know values drive value, why haven’t platforms connected our hearts to our wallets?

How is it that despite being in a unique position to reinvent how we find, categorize and share our music, Apple continues to rely on dated, arbitrary and increasingly mundane classification methods? They’ve left us to “discover” music based on the most downloads and views, or what the “who’s who” is listening to. Today’s consumer isn’t influenced or inspired by conventional arbiters of taste. And that ‘heart’ emoticon? What a reductive way of capturing how we feel about a song. We’re looking forward to a future where listeners are asked to assign value to a song based on the action it empowers them to take or how it actually made them feel instead of some arbitrary five-star rating system or an emoticon without the nuance necessary to capture our complex reactions.