URL is the new MP3
Redefining music library for the streaming era.
I opened Chrome and started typing on the address bar. As I hit the letter “s..”, I got my top 3 matching destinations:
It’s true that I spend far too much time listening to music, but I guess if not the same, a similar case would hold for many music enthusiasts out there. Even though I pay 10$/month for Spotify, I still use Soundcloud for sets & podcasts. Well, soma.fm is my guilty pleasure, it’s my long-working-hours music.
The way we consume music has changed
Contrary to this, I had a single go-to destination in the past: Winamp. It was a simple yet effective solution to keep up with all my music in a single place. Since then, the way we consume music has changed so drastically that a significant portion of music consumers will not even know or remember what “Winamp” is… It was the place where everyone gathered and organized all their mp3 files, long before they did it in iTunes. It was your music library.
Yes, access to content was not even comparable to what we have today. You can now listen to a couple of songs on Youtube in the same time period that it took you to download an MP3 back then. But once you had the access, you were the king of Musicland. You could go back as you wished to listen to it over and over again. I’ll be talking more on that line later.
This mess we’re in
As streaming slowly but steadily replaces MP3’s, things have gotten a little out of control. We started seeing more companies and products join the streaming game, even though a vast majority are never profitable. They solved access to content, as well as content discovery. Hundreds of them. We started using multiple products for multiple needs. Just like I do, more than 40 million people pay subscription services for the massive content and offline sync. That aside, Youtube is still the number-one destination for quick access and for shareable links, while Soundcloud’s extensive indie & electronic catalog doesn’t exist anywhere else. We also use discovery services, playlist sharing tools, and spend time on countless music blogs.
Today, we switch between different services for a full experience; and end up building disconnected libraries. It’s like having a couple of CD players in your backpack, just to listen to your different CDs on the road.
Let me tell you how the current setup breaks my experience. I use Facebook groups to share music with my friends and other music enthusiasts who I’ve never personally met. When I like a song, (and when I have some time(!), obviously) I go to Spotify, search for it, and add it to an existing playlist. Oh, and there’s the case that the song is not there. Then, I bookmark it on my browser, or leave the tab open for days, until I decide to download it.
The increasing number of different music services is not the only cause of this mess we’re in. (Thanks, Thom!)
Audio content is not only fragmented in different sources, but also on different mediums. We come across new music almost everywhere, on our Facebook feeds, blogs, discovery services like Pandora, or directly in streaming services like Youtube or Spotify.
Well actually, this fragmentation is not completely unreasonable. To some extent, music consumption, discovery and sharing have to be fragmented. On-demand services, download services, discovery services, internet radio… They are all complementary products from an end user perspective; definitely not substitutes. Just because I subscribe to Spotify does not mean that I wouldn’t enjoy the occasional discoveries on HypeMachine, or stay tuned to the latest sets on Soundcloud.
But after all, this should not be the reason why I can’t keep a single and united library for all.
I need an online Winamp!
Internet needs a Save button
The need for a single library is not only valid for audio content; digital media is fragmented on a larger scale. However, different from media types like images or text, audio content is re-consumed, over and over again. To give you an idea, we analysed a random sample of 1000 engaged listeners on last.fm. Once a user likes a song, they will go back and listen to that same song 40 times more within a year range. This is not official data and may range for different set of users, but you get the idea. Music is timeless!
If you don’t make it extremely easy for listeners to keep what they like, they’re missing %97.5 of the fun! Looking at this also with an industry point of view, it means 40 times less revenue for artists, labels and less engagement for streaming services.
To simply quantify the need to save audio content that you’d encounter anywhere, we came up with the following formula:
Well, an average song lasts 3–4 minutes. Compared to an image, or a tweet, you’d agree that the consumption duration is significantly greater, and the probability of consuming it is definitely lower.
It’s not rocket science to figure out that the willingness to bookmark images or text is significantly less than the same desire for audio. However, even though we have the solutions for the former, we sadly lack the solution for the latter. Actually, it is easy to move images or text around thanks to web technologies, but for music you have to be smarter than that.
A single place for all your online music
The need to redefine the music library experience for the streaming era cannot be unseen. That’s why we’ve build cubic.fm.
cubic.fm is a supercharged Winamp, powered by streaming URLs instead of MP3s. It’s the simplest way to save any music you come across; and stream all on the same player.
We want to create a way to make listening to music as easy as buying it from iTunes but as affordable as streaming sites have made it.
Instead of asking you to change your listening experience, we wanted to be WITH you in your experience. That’s why we’ve started off with a Chrome extension. Our extension will give you a “save” button wherever you come across musical content; a Youtube page, your Facebook feed, Pandora, you name it. One click will add that track to your library.
Doesn’t matter where you listen to or discover music; you’ll take your button wherever you go.
Each sound you save using the extension will be added to your library, which is currently available as a web-app. You might even save songs from different sources like Youtube, Spotify, Deezer, Soundcloud; you’ll be able to stream all on the same player.
If you’re directly saving from the source, like on a Youtube page, or an embedded Soundcloud post, we’ll save the content on that link. If you’re on a discovery service like Pandora, we’ll search for the song you add on the sources we’ve integrated, and again, will add it you your library.
Our algorithm automatically matches each saved song on all different sources and streams you from the best available one. This could depend on where you are (catalogue availability) or which services you’re logged in to on that browser.
To help listeners keep up with all the music they save, we created Channels. Channels are dynamic playlists. You’d be able to catagorize your tracks in different channels, and easily keep on adding to them.
We know the experience will be complete when available on multiple platforms, primarily on iOS and Android. We’re working on that as well ☺
URL is the new MP3!
When we say “URL is the new MP3”, we don’t mean it the way Spotify did in 2009, when it was promoting the transition from ownership to accessing music. That’s not our point, that already happened!
We want to paint you another picture. The picture in which your personal music library experience with Winamp, iTunes or a similar player is rebuilt into your streaming experience. We’re giving you a library space, powered not by MP3 files, but streaming URLs.
We are super excited to share cubic.fm with you. It’s currently in private beta, evolving through the feedback of early enthusiasts.
If you’re as excited about this as we are, we’d love to welcome you aboard!
If you also believe that the music library experience has to be redefined for the streaming era, please click the “recommend” button. It helps us reach out to more people like you.
This post also appears on the cubic.fm blog.
