Curation without Context
What Spotify doesn’t understand about creating value
In a bid for mainstream appeal, subscription music services are doubling down on tools that turn their dauntingly large databases into something more accessible. Spotify’s $100M purchase of The Echo Nest highlights the size and significance of these bets. Whether it’s personalized radio, hand-picked playlists, or mood-specific mixes, product development at subscription services has focused on solving the “tyranny of choice” that plagues consumers searching through 20M tracks.
Spotify and its competitors are convinced that better curation will win them the streaming music space, but do mainstream consumers — the lynchpin of the streaming business model — find value in music discovery? Let’s consider the consumer perspective.
What makes a typical consumer willing to pay for Spotify?
At $10 per month, selling playlists, radio stations, or other curated bundles of music— however expertly selected — isn’t enough. In our digital age, music is everywhere. Music, in the general sense, is free. If consumers are willing to accept a few ads, and the history of the Internet tells us they usually are, then finding a curated, “lean-back” music experience has never been easier. You could try Pandora, Songza, or Soundcloud, but mostly the FM radio works just fine.
This story changes when people care about the particulars: the new Taylor Swift album, the Talking Head’s back catalog, and that certain song that makes someone nostalgic for the 90s. Specific music still has value. Specific music isn’t free. Consumers pay for on-demand access to the albums, artists, and songs they love.
The question then becomes: what product features will promote these emotional connections with specific albums, artists, and songs?
Consider Beyoncé’s latest album, which was notably absent from subscription catalogs. The standard explanation was that Beyoncé eschewed Spotify to prevent cannibalization of her album sales. But it’s also true that the very elements that made her surprise album a success — a direct-to-fan connection, feelings of exclusivity, and bundled video content— couldn’t have been delivered on the Spotify platform. Spotify, in its current construction, inhibits artists from adding value to their music.
Labels have long understood the need to sell an artist story in addition to their music. There may only be one Beyoncé, but every artist uses their personal history, personality, media presence, video content, fashion sense, pedigree, and more to create demand and to connect with fans. These supporting details, the context, help us understand and appreciate music.
Context helps us connect, on a personal level, with an artist and their art, yet context is what’s lost when songs are surfaced in a black box, however sophisticated, from a massive database of music.
Curation isn’t pointless: it’s a “nice to have” feature that connects would-be fans with new artists. But discovery is not the only step that turns listeners into fans, and—given the current offerings in the market—curation creates little value for the mainstream consumer.
Context is notably missing from most subscription services. Apart from a short bio and some album art, listeners have to leave streaming platforms to better understand their music. This burden doesn’t have to fall on the consumer. London-based Musikki demonstrates how information from across the web can be brought together, at scale, to create more robust artist narratives. Mobile-focused Discovr creates visual maps of artist and genre relationships that allow users to explore a larger musical picture. These apps and others prove that context can be a differentiating feature, even if the music itself is not.
When subscription services prioritize curation over context, they cheapen their own product. Promoting tracks in isolation (and not say, artists with human appeal) supports the notion that songs are commodities. With Apple clamoring to reduce the price of its forthcoming service and price cuts from Spotify, it appears that consumers have gotten the message.
