How Can Music Services Adapt to the World of AirPods? And What Can You Learn From It?

The ubiquity of wireless headphones has triggered an important shift in the behavior of audiophiles everywhere. Could capitalizing on this shift allow rising music-streaming services to attack the throne?

The streaming industry is fierce. The top giants boast tremendous user-retention rates, high paid-to-free user ratios and a proven ability to react fast. Could this be SoundCloud’s — or another emerging player’s — chance to intensify its presence in the streaming industry?

Privacy, mobility and fidelity: These are the alluring features that make Americans spend $2.3 billion on headphones every year. Let’s face it: We’ll do anything to hear The Weeknd sing “After Hours” perfectly. I know I would.

But in the final stretch of the 2010s, the experience of mobility has found itself being completely redefined. Nowadays, thanks to the movement pioneered by Apple AirPods, wireless headphones have become as commonplace as their next of kin, smartphones themselves. “No wires,” a simple concept, gave birth to complex, undersense behavioral changes in how people listen to music.

If you tune in to any AirPod device, you’ll likely find they’re streaming via Apple Music or Spotify. These two services have the already-fierce industry by its neck.

But this industry is full of gems, such as SoundCloud, YouTube Premium, Pandora and others. Can these services take advantage of the emerging trend to boost their footing?

For rising streaming services, I believe capitalizing on this new physical-user behavior represents a strategy for both product differentiation and intelligently inferring user states. It doesn’t matter if you’re first or last; anticipating and executing on an emerging trend presents an opportunity to shake up the ladder.

I believe there are two techniques these services can adopt:

Utilize motion from wireless devices to strategically target streaming ads

Before, you couldn’t truly maneuver open-handedly with wired headphones. Now, people are going to do a lot of things without their phones in their hands — and streaming services must take advantage of that. Image: Unsplash

In technology, the name of the game is targeted ads. Most companies make money by offering a “freemium” version of their product that relies on showing users ads; Spotify, SoundCloud, YouTube, Pandora and others all do this.

This is a huge challenge for streaming products. Unlike social media or search engine applications that are teeming with actionable user data, streaming services can’t know as much about their users. It’s just due to the nature of the product. They excel at targeting internal product features (e.g., Spotify showing you Joe Budden’s podcast based on your recent hip-hop playlist), but they seriously struggle to target third-party ads — the kind that let them generate revenue.

I believe the enhanced motion tracking afforded by the “world of AirPods” presents a tremendous opportunity for streaming services to intelligently (and harmlessly) understand their users more to further target ads.

Modern wireless devices come with extreme range as a design affordance. Your phone can be out of sight the entire time. Imagine all the new levels of activity this will enable.

Users have new mobility super-powers, so they’re going to be in motion a lot more. Cooking, skateboarding, dancing, walking — all these in-motion activities are going to happen more, and they are signals to the streaming services that their user is not looking at their screen.

If streaming services can detect a user is in motion (thus not observing their screen), they can use this information to optimize the ads they run at specific scenarios. Some examples of this optimization include:

• For video/music hybrid services running a more aural-centric ad (as opposed to visual-centric). If SoundCloud detects a user is in motion, they might experience a lower ad “skip” rate by showing ads that communicate a brand/product’s value through sound rather than visuals.
• Running ads that tend to have a lower “skip” rate when a user is in motion or stationary. This defines a whole new genre of internal user research, with the guiding research question being, “Are there specific product/service categories that perform better when a user is in motion (e.g., exercising, walking)?
• Experimenting with the frequency at which to run ads when the user is in a certain motion class. For example, a user running on a treadmill is probably more likely to skip an ad to continue listening to her pump-up playlist. Whereas a user who’s listening while cooking is probably less likely to maneuver back to his phone to issue a “skip” — he’ll probably just keep listening.

Sure, users have been in motion even with traditional wired headphones, and phones, themselves, have a level of motion tracking. The compelling change now is the design innovation of wireless devices further empowering users to be mobile, while its technological innovation make this information more precisely trackable.

Incorporate “customized gestures” in streaming feature development

The wired headphone has always been viewed as a static, secondary object, rather than an enabling, feature-rich tool. Wired headphones allowed users to perform perfunctory tasks in a perfunctory way; it just didn’t consciously feel part of the experience.

Sophisticated devices, such as AirPods, changed that. They introduced “customized gestures,” a novel (and largely unexplored!) feature, where users can issue specific commands to their streaming application via a combination of “taps” on their device, as shown below. Apple introduced the ability for users to decide what combination of taps activate which action.

Right now, you can do traditional streaming user actions, such as skip, rewind and pause/play tracks via your AirPods (the same ones you could have done before with any wired headphones). But now, users are conditioned to think without a visual interface, making it very attractive for streaming services to integrate with this functionality to enhance what people can do. Image: AppleInsider

Now, these actions feel addictively smooth and effortless. This experience of ease will condition users to think without a visual interface and will also build their dependence on AirPods (an accompanying physical device) to communicate with their streaming applications.

As a result, streaming applications could incorporate “integration” with wireless headphones’ customized tap gestures, or in other words, include customized gestures in feature development, as depicted below:

An example of what this new flow would look like. Customized gestures add another dimension of capability to the product mix of streaming services.

The idea is simple: Augment what users can do with their AirPods by enabling them to perform specific in-app actions through the AirPod device, itself. This is similar to an Amazon Alexa skill, allowing you to jam-pack a series of actions in a specific voice command.

For example, if one of my daily active habits is playing a specific album I like, I’d have to go through several steps:

1. Authenticate into my mobile device.
2. Open Spotify, and clear whatever session I had previously running.
3. Navigate and activate the search interface.
4. Land on the appropriate artist page.
5. Navigate to the right album/playlist, and start playing.

If I could do this through, say, a simple triple-tap on my left AirPod, I’d be able to get to my goal state a lot faster.

All in all, the advent of customized gestures presents an opportunity for streaming services to encourage feature engagement by capitalizing on an emerging user behavior.

A commendable design practice is maintaining consistency among multiple versions of your product. This can be across mobile, desktop or tablet interfaces. When a new feature is inspired, PMs and designers investigate how this feature should work across all their interfaces. Now, with the onset of wireless listening devices, a new unavoidable question arises: How will this feature integrate with the physical aspects of wireless technology?

The technical feasibility of this hasn’t been defined yet. Perhaps this could be accomplished via intercepting tap signals from the wireless devices themselves, or maybe some interconnection with the iOS/Android OS layer. But I’m certain once streaming services realize the potential in this space, they’ll find a way to make this happen.

Key insights for everyone

Even if you don’t work in this specific technology space, there are still some actionable takeaways:

• Don’t just keep an eye on your competitors; keep an eye on the interdependent services and products. For example, if you develop point-of-sale payment products, it’s important to observe supporting technologies, such as near-field communication (NFC) chips of Apple Pay, the rise of social networking payments and maybe even the entrance of cryptocurrency.
• Emerging trends provide a safer space for taking risks. Being the first to attack a newly recognized trend allows you to experiment with minimal investment, as you are competing against no one except your own alternative hypothesis. If it goes well, you’ve encouraged users to advance in the product-adoption curve. If it doesn’t, well, hey, you’re the only one in your space who knows.

For the up-and-coming players in the streaming game, the fight for profitability is very real. As someone who streams thousands of hours of music a year, I’m fascinated by the music-streaming industry and am impatient to see how it evolves. Moving forward, I’ve got no doubt hardware devices will fall into their strategy mix. The question is: Who will do it first?