Envisioning Snapchat’s impact on music
It’s new technology platforms that have led the evolution of the music industry over the last decade(s), and as the size of Snapchat continues to soar (and its interest in music grows), artists, managers, and labels should be looking at it as a valuable tool. For the scale (100–200MM active monthly users) and demographics (13-25 y/o, 70% female) of Snapchat, it has been surprising that relatively few artists have taken advantage of it yet. I think that’ll change in 2015.
Here’s a look at how/why Snapchat will impact music.
Leveraging Snaps and Stories
There is already huge opportunity for the music industry to leverage Snapchat’s existing functionality: the original, short “snaps” that vanish after a few seconds and the longer, public “Stories” that last 24 hrs.
- More intimate artist-fan engagement. Snapchat is a one-to-one communication tool. Yes, you can send the same message to a hundred people (or a hundred thousand), but the experience for the recipient is solely with you. This is the difference between new messaging apps and the prior generation of social media — it’s back to more personal conversation rather than public, permanent, mass conversations. Its most used feature, Snapchat Stories, tends to provide a more intimate glimpse into the day-to-day of someone’s experiences through its string of short photo and video clips than Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, etc. — no doubt in large part because the content isn’t meant to stay on permanent record or be publicly commented on by “the masses”. For artists (and affiliated brands), Snapchat is a way to engage with fans more like friends; as a user, there’s a degree to which you would feel like your favorite artist just texted you (so intimate that users actually like receiving ads from brands they know). It’s especially valuable to showing the life of an artist behind-the-scenes in a creative, participatory manner where fans can reply using stickers, the drawing tool, etc. on top of the photos sent to them.
- Crowdsourced live-streaming of concerts/events. Starting with the Electric Daisy Carnival in Las Vegas last June, “Our Stories” are Stories shared to every user on Snapchat that chronicle a specific live event through video and photos contributed by the people there (and by the organizers and sponsors, who help curate). A “geo-fence” even blocks those not in attendance from submitting unrelated content. This crowdsourced version of a concert live-stream gives a far deeper feel of the experience of attending a given concert. Live-streaming shows have been hit or miss (often miss) in music thus far, in part because of fears that a stream of what’s happening on stage will cannibalize ticket sales. A Snapchat “Our Story” of a concert, however, focuses on the full experience fans have (with low production cost). It’s stunning marketing for showcasing how fun a concert is to attend, and it’s placed right where every Snapchat user is already putting their time and attention each day (the Our Stories streams are right alongside their friends’ Stories on the app). I expect we’ll see many major artists who are touring in 2015 get in on this opportunity to broadcast their concert experience to millions of users.
- Immediacy of Ephemeral Content. If you show up at Madison Square Garden the day after a concert, you missed it…it happened and now it’s gone. Because that unique experience is available only in the place and time scheduled, it becomes more special: fans are willing to pay a premium to be there and they’ll reschedule other commitments to make sure they can. Fans get more excited about, and will pay for, an experience that’s truly unique (just look at the boom in touring and festivals). The ephemeral content on Snapchat has a similar effect — if you check for an artist’s Story the day after it was posted then you’re too late. This will push fans to engage with their favorite artists every single day on Snapchat and creates the opportunity to capture economic value around gaining access to limited-time experiences (see Snapcash below).
Snapchat “Discover”
If you skim Fab.com/Hem CEO Jason Goldberg’s recent Tweetstorm that Twitter should “monetize usage not users” you’ll recognize that Snapchat is doing just that (or rather, they’re doing both…but leaning more toward usage than Twitter has).
The rumored “Discover” project at Snapchat is supposed to integrate professional media content into the platform through partnerships with Spotify, VEVO, BuzzFeed, Vice, etc. on a rev-share model (it looks like the media partners would be responsible for managing ads around or within their content).
I’ve zero inside knowledge of a Spotify-Snapchat collaboration, but I imagine it’d center on the ability to access and share (via snaps to friends) songs and playlists from your linked Spotify account that can be played within the app. That’d be a valuable boost to Snapchat and would benefit Spotify greatly given the user acquisition potential of tapping into Snapchat’s user base (while much older, Spotify has ~50MM active users for comparison). A VEVO integration with music video content would probably look similar, if that happens, and would open the door to a list of potential product integrations with other music-related services down the line.
Down the line…
When you permit yourself to think of expanding product features beyond what already exists, there are a lot of possibilities to build music into the core of Snapchat.
In particular, you can currently add drawings, stickers, and various widgets (time, temperature, etc.) to your photos and videos on Snapchat, but what you can’t yet do is add audio clips of popular songs to accompany the visuals. Perhaps that’s something a Spotify partnership would enable, although it’d probably require direct deals with labels. The clips could just be secondary to the visual content or — conversely — the collection of visual content in a Story could be used to annotate a song itself as it plays (somewhat in the vein of commenting on different points in a song on Soundcloud). Search Twitter for “Snapchat Music” and you see a constantly churning stream of people complaining that they can’t do this (visuals + music) yet.
Snapcash also introduced us to the potential of transactions across the Snapchat platform. Because of the drive toward revenue-share based media partnerships and the increased value created by the immediacy of an ephemeral experience, it wouldn’t surprise me to eventually see premium content within Snapchat (by media partners) that users pay to access like they would in buying a ticket to an event or premium content elsewhere.
Strategically, ephemerality may seem to go against the goals of top content creators: if you put the time and resources into producing a song or music video, you want that content to live online permanently, not merely for a few seconds, hours, or days. But Snapchat wouldn’t replace the permanent homes for such content online; it’s a complement. In fact, the ephemerality of content on Snapchat could in time place it at the heart of “windowing” strategies that the industry continues to experiment with. Snapchat would be the natural place for an artist to provide early access to their new song/album/video (for free or for a cost) before it vanishes and later becomes publicly, permanently available across the usual sites. To my knowledge, Afrojack has been the only major artist to experiment with Snapchat for windowing a new album (albeit only in short clips), but I think we’ll see a lot more of it in the year ahead.
Once Snapchat formally announces the details of its media partnerships for Discover, their ambitions for music on the platform will likely become much clearer. I expect that its value to the music industry is about to soar, however, and — unlike the snaps themselves — stick around for a long time.
