How Much do People Really Like Music Livestreams?
In the past few weeks, we released two surveys with the intent of collecting our users’ opinions about watching music livestreams overall.
We noticed that the people we surveyed spent a significant amount of time on a computer every day, much more compared to a mobile device which was surprising. People also overwhelmingly preferred to watch livestreams on a computer rather than a mobile device. During this time, people answered that they watched more than 30 minutes of media every day.
Capturing a higher percentage of the total media viewing time, and delivering a high-quality experience simultaneously is an important goal of ours.
Currently, people do not look to watch a musician perform the same amount of time as if they were live, and most would only watch in the range of 0–20 minutes.
This data fades the information posted by one of our competitors like Twitch which stated that their average user has a watch time of 106 minutes per day.
One of the reasons that Twitch’s watch duration is so high is that the platform was built around gamers where the average game ranges from 30–60 minutes. On the other hand, Creative Xchange is built around the love of music and sharing that love and passion to others. The average song is around three minutes, so our average user is saying they would stay for approximately five songs.
In our survey we discovered that people are not willing to treat livestreams the same way as they do concerts as the average concert experience requires 2–3 hours of dedication. But, this shouldn’t be surprising. Listening to music at a live, in-person performance is obviously on a totally different level compared to listening to music through your headphones.
Based on the data we collected, finding ways to allow you to have an experience closer to that of a live, in-person music performance is the next step to providing you with a more enjoyable and high-quality experience in our livestreams. We plan on developing ways to allow you to better interact and engage with the musicians during the livestreams in order to provide you a meaningful experience and allow you to develop a closer connection with your favorite artists.
We also understand the some may not be able to watch a livestream at all at the scheduled times. Ensuring that you are able to enjoy a musician’s or band’s performance at any time is important to us. We found that the time of the livestream significantly impacts your ability to attend, and we also found that many of you would rather watch a livestream in the evening compared to any other time. However, we found that for those that cannot attend a livestream, they would watch it at a later time if it was recorded.
Recording livestream performances for future viewing seems to be the logical next step. We understand that many people are unable to attend livestream performances at the scheduled time: life happens. A big part of making high quality livestreams is making sure that people can watch them in the first place. If the musician lives in Europe and you live in Asia, we want to make sure you can enjoy the same high-quality performance at a time that is more convenient for you. Recording the livestreams will hopefully allow you to enjoy the performances to the fullest.
In the process of developing more ways to allow you to more closely interact with the performers, we asked a few questions regarding some possible ideas that we had to implement.
One of the things we found you to show interest in is the possibility of obtaining exclusive merchandise for watching a musician or a band. However, not much interest was shown in displaying leaderboards for “Super Fans” in the livestream. We plan to collect more data and brainstorm more ideas to provide ways of interaction that would be most appealing to you.
We also asked questions that looked to see how much you would be willing to pay for certain forms of interaction with the artist or band. Specifically, we wanted to see the willingness for you to pay an artist to be able to ask questions, or pick a specific song for them to perform.
The data in the first graph indicates that many of you are on the fence about paying an artist/band in exchange for closer interaction. This outcome in the data should not be surprising. We expect many people to be unwilling to pay for anything, especially if they can “free-ride” off of others when they pay. On the other hand, the amount of people that would consider paying was higher than expected.
We believe that giving opportunities for the artist to gain more support and make more money is core to our purpose of giving artists a platform to make a living. Although many people may not use this service at all, it is still a worthwhile pursuit for the artist and also for those that seek a closer level of interaction with the artist as well. Working to develop high-quality ways for you to interact with the artist will hopefully encourage many of you that are uncertain to support the artist through paid forms of interaction.
With just a simple livestream alone, it appears that many don’t find music livestream performances to be anymore entertaining that any other livestream performance. Our goal is to continually work to provide a high standard of music performance and interaction with the artist, and the data indicate that there are many possibilities and opportunities to continually improve and reach that goal.
David Zhang & Aidan Suljic
Marketing Creative Xchange
