Swarm.fm Update
Past, Present and Future
For those who have been following the story of Swarm.fm, an update is well overdue. A lot has been happening behind the scenes, but until now, there wasn’t much to talk about. We’ve had our heads down, building like crazy. But today there is some news, so I figured it was about time I gave a quick update on what’s been happening!
After releasing the Spotify App two years ago, we set about exploring solutions in the three key areas where we found the online music experience to be lacking:
— Fragmentation between services (I use multiple, friends use different)
— Sharing discoveries with like-minded friends and peers
— What to listen to (both new discoveries and old faves)
Ideas were plentiful, but at every turn we encountered either technical hurdles, competitive risks or user indifference. I could go into much more detail, but essentially we came to the conclusion that while there were plenty of opportunities to build something cool, there was very little space to build a business. Most of the ideas we had were better off as side projects or built into an existing service like Spotify or Soundcloud. These companies are rapidly improving and reaching maturity, leaving less room (and need) for small startups to innovate over the top.
More importantly, the extent of “problems” like discovery, social and fragmentation in the music space are greatly overestimated. This is best illustrated by looking at some of the other startups attacking these problems:
Discovery — Hype Machine (try the genre feeds!)
Social — Soundwave and This Is My Jam
Fragmentation — Tomahawk and Bop.fm
If you are truly afflicted by one these problems, you should love these services. But in reality, they aren’t a high priority for most of us, and we end up falling back into our regular habits.
Rather than building another niche product, using up the rest of our runway and going the way of so many music startups before us (extinct), we decided to go back to the drawing board and see if we could funnel all the learnings into developing something new. Swarm.fm as we originally envisaged it has been indefinitely shelved, but in it’s place, hopefully something bigger and better will emerge. Which brings me to some announcements…
1. Something new is in the works ; )
Throughout all the experimentation, there is one area that has continued to show promise: Personalization. Most apps don’t know that much about us, so they’re forced to make compromises. They’ll show popular content because it has wide coverage, or they’ll offer a few suggestions of what we might like, and leave us with the difficult task of making a choice. It happens in just about every vertical where decisions are involved (Music, Movies, Places, Products, etc).
The problem is not the process of personalizing. Amazon, Google and Netflix are all experts in this. The problem lies with the user taste profiles on which all personalization is built. When gathering taste data for a user, you can monitor their activity in your app, import external activity or get their explicit input on what they like. All methods tend to be imperfect or incomplete. This leads to inaccurate taste profiles and renders any smart technology useless, because you are essentially personalizing for the wrong person.
In a nutshell, the means with which we build an understanding of a user’s taste is the biggest factor holding back personalization technology. It’s a hard problem, but if you can crack it, it opens the door to all sorts of smart apps that make our lives easier. I’ve spent a lot of time attacking it and the early results are quite exciting. I don’t have anything else to share today, but keep your eyes peeled for a prototype.
p.s. it’s not a music app!
2. The Swarm.fm Spotify app is being shut down : (
I’ve tried to keep this app running as long as possible, but unfortunately that run must come to an end. The server it is hosted on is getting so slow, bloated and expensive that my only option is to pull the plug. Apologies to the loyal users out there, but in return, I have some consolation…
3. A new Swarm.fm web app is now available : )
The Spotify App was never updated because all the ideas we had for how to improve it went into the next app we were working on. Given that that app has been shelved, and the Spotify App shut down, I thought it would be nice to build a simple Web App to replace it.
By far, the most popular feature of the Spotify App was New Releases. Not the social activity, not the discovery features, just a simple way to see when your favorite artists put out something new. This was the inspiration for the new app: to help you stay connected with artists you care about. You’ll be surprised by how much stuff you’ve missed along the way (releases, concerts, news, etc) and this is the app to help you stay in the know.
After logging in with Spotify, it checks your playlists to see what you like, and shows a highly relevant selection of New Releases and Upcoming Concerts. It is designed to be personal (everything is tailored to your taste), steerable (quickly add & remove artists to improve results) and easy to digest (only critical information, displayed clearly). It’s blazing fast, straight to the point and works in both desktop and mobile browsers.
Give it a spin and let me know what you think!
Peter
@ptrwtts
