8tracks
What is 8tracks?
The website www.8tracks.com is an internet radio and social networking website. It is similar to other famous music sharing platforms available online such as SoundCloud and Pandora. It was launched on 8th August, 2008 and prides itself on the concept of streaming user-curated playlists consisting of a minimum of 8 tracks.
I have chosen this website because unlike SoundCloud and other advanced platforms, 8tracks is still working on developing their website and curating their content in a more personalised manner towards their users. Users can create free accounts and can either browse the website and listen to other user-created mixes, and/or they can can create their own mixes. This platform also allows for a subscription based service known as 8tracks plus. This currently offers users a listening experience without advertisements, however, they are trying to evolve by offering specific DJ-focused features, including profile customisation, mix analytics, and unlimited uploads.
What is an online radio?
8tracks and other Internet radio website are platforms where users are allowed to explore different kinds of songs and a variety of artists based on their musical preferences. Through this process, listeners are able to discover new songs and artist that they would otherwise never have encountered. These Internet radio stations randomly select songs that are similar to the user’s initial choice and curate the playlists, thus making them based off of the listener’s preferences.
How did they capture the right data from users to allow for grouping and organisation? How important is personalisation and identity to making that content usable?
8tracks shares a feature very similar to SoundCloud, Pandora and other such online music streaming platforms in that allows any user to upload their content without any form of authenticity or approval. Thus, it is the users that are the creators of the content being streamed by their website. This is what sets it apart from other commercial platforms such as Apple Music and Spotify, who set themselves apart by acquiring rights to the music through distribution services and uploading this music only to their specific links. Hence, simply put, the content on 8tracks is often created and always curated by the people who avail of this service and listen to it.
By requesting for a unique artist tag, Artists are able to promote their music on 8tracks with a special account. They are able to create mixes with a combination of their own and others’ music, or to post full albums via a content-owner account. By using 8tracks to promote their music, fans have the chance to interact with the artists.
When an artist posts on 8tracks, they are offered a variety of tags to categorise their content. This makes it simpler for the service providers to organise the content that is being uploaded, while still making it simpler for them and provide a more accurate listening experience to their users by suggesting songs that belong to their genre of interest. They have also employed the idea of “Popularity” to sort through their content, as songs and artists that have a higher “Number of Plays” are featured first while listing the songs and will also be there on the home page. This feature has been enabled by 8tracks by partnered with Feature.fm to allow artists to further promote their songs natively within 8tracks by playing their songs to listeners who are currently listening to the artist’s genre of music.
Thus, this goes to show us that personalisation and identity is essential to the success of this platform, ie. making the content easily usable by the listeners.
What rewards or other incentives encouraged users to return and continue to use the service?
8tracks primarily being a free music sharing platform incentivises users to return and continue to use their service. Furthermore, the accuracy with which they are able to curate the playlists based on the users previous listening choices is something that brings back users. Users find it simpler
How did they structure or help users navigate their data as a group (lists)? Is there key important information or taxonomy that helped users understand or change expectations or to embrace a new concept?This is where the feature of “taxonomies” comes in play for this service creator. They have simple “Playlist Types/Genre’s” that are featured on the page as a list, with each of them sampling their top 4 “Playlists”. These playlist types are the tag’s under which the users can upload their music, for example “Sad songs” and “Sleep songs” that can be seen below.
What are the key user flows that were developed and how did they contribute to the keeping the data relevant or actionable?
The key user flows for this application are relatively simple and linear. From the homepage they first allow the user to create an account, however, if they are unsure of doing so and simply want to avail the service and try it out first, they have the option of scrolling down and listening to the music of their choice that is curated under specific titles. If they would like more options within a particular title, they have the simple option of clicking on that link and exploring other options.
Here is a brief glimpse of what’s been mentioned above.
blob:https://web.whatsapp.com/1e982d54-fe10-42af-9d55-2540b4dc0643
Where will they improve, what can users expect in the future, can you hypothesize how their platform will evolve?
As mentioned at the start, this platform is undergoing some evolution at the moment, however, in order to keep up with their competitors, they could start exploring other language genres in music. They have managed to capture international markets, however, they are unable to capitalise on the language spheres that they cover. Hence, in my opinion, the next plausible step to improve their platform would be to provide music that spans more languages.