5 surprising facts about new music discovery
I spent the better part of last week with Kate & Michael of 747 Insights conducting focus groups and in-home visits with several millennials in the Chicago area. Our goal was to better understand when, where, and how millennials discover new music.
As an avid consumer and fan of music, I was not expecting to be that surprised during this research. Turns out that was a bad expectation (I should have remembered the lesson that every marketing class at Kellogg has repeatedly tried to teach me: I am NOT the typical consumer). Here are a few things that surprised me:
- Passive, serendipitous discovery appears to be much more common than active discovery. That is to say, very rarely did any of our participants seek out new music because he or she was bored of their existing collection. It was much more common that a new song was recommended to them by a friend or they stumbled up it on the radio or a playlist.
- The window to be remembered is 10 seconds long, at best. Once intrigued by a song during passive discovery, participants all expressed a need to either immediately follow up with action or jot a note down to remember to do it later. Some people texted themselves a reminder. Others tagged it in Shazam. Others looked the artist up on Instagram. We consistently heard that creating this reminder was important to ensure the fan journey could proceed at a later time.
- The fan journey crosses many apps (and devices). The multi-platform phenomenon is nothing new. What was surprising was to watch it in action and witness how quickly people jumped from one source of information to another. Artists have to be everywhere, because potential fans also give up quick. An example of one fan’s journey:
I heard a song on the radio while driving to work. I tagged it on Shazam. I looked it up the next day on Google. I read an interview with the artist. I looked for music video on YouTube and then I listened to the whole album. YouTube recommended a clip of the artist on Carpool Karaoke, which made me love her even more because she seemed so relatable. - Instagram should be at the center of every artist’s brand strategy. Some participants weren’t interested in learning anything about an artist outside of the music. But many were. They were all looking on Instagram as a source of updates. One participant even expressed distress that Ed Sheeran is “taking a break from Instagram,” forcing her to go and follow a bunch of Ed Sheeran fan accounts to get her fix.
- Sirius XM is a beloved (expensive) product. People really love it. And those without it still listen to regular old radio. Turns out, suburban Americans are always in their cars and radio rules the car. I had seen the stats on radio’s share of ear in the music market but I still didn’t believe them until each and every one of our participants mentioned the radio as a source of discovery. Even those with auxiliary cords or bluetooth-enabled cars tended to use the radio because it was “easier” and didn’t “drain my cell data” and “Sirius XM is so great.”
Libby Koerbel loves to analyze ambiguous questions, listen to live music, and meet new people. She is an expert strategist with experience at the Boston Consulting Group, Pandora, Universal Music Group, Muzooka, and Pritzker Group Venture Capital. She is currently a MBA student at the Kellogg School of Management.
This post is a part of a series on how millennials discover content. Read more on: framing uncertainty, curation wars, music tastes, sticky subscription models, and abundance.
