The Metro Music Vision/update
How the journey began
As a team we accepted the “Big Music Bet” given by Mrs Betty Tsakarestou, Domnika Skreta and Antenna Lab by the begining of the spring semester. “Big Music Bet” involves finding innoavtion not only for the music industry but for everyone who is in interaction with music.
After a long journey of reseach and “ painstaking” braistorming(we had to admit )we came up with a lots of ideas. However, trying to get a glimpse of the startup world and how the whole thing works we realised that without the right tools and knowledge we couldn’t reach anything. Thanks to the proper guidance from professionals we are now here to showcase our work.
At first, we learned about approximetly two dozens of new music startups doing amazing work in the music industry. After, examinatited the list of music startup we decided to write an article about the music startup“Songtradr” which is basically a company that mediates for copywrites.
Tools like Costumer Journey Map and Guerrila Usabillity Testing come to open our mind and teach us how to check if our product prototypes (app or wedsite) are user friendly. Having as base the one by one interview Guerrila Usabillity Testing, the potential user can briefly provide you with useful information involving the efficiency of your product. From the other hand, Cosumer Journey Map, allows you to register the steps a costumer have to make in order to complete successfully his journey to your product.
Now, let me tell you a story,
It’s Monday around 10p.m at night, you’ve just left the class, your head is bumbing from concetrated knowledge but the brand new series of “Black Mirror” is waiting for you at home, it seems to be a long night. But first, of course, you have to take the subway. It’s ok, you think, you will relax those 15 minutes before reaching home, clear your mind and prepare for the long night I told you before ,it’s a win win, right? You reach the station, get in the subway, it’s nearly empty, lucky me, you think, and you lean your head towards the window. Then a earsplitting voice from behind you cames to the disturb your peace, the lady behind you is yelling to her phone furiously, and due to the subway’s sound, your chance to relax for a bit disappears. Your head is about to burst now and your nerves are tended, you come home really irritated with a very persistent headache. Your “Netflix and Chill” night is now ruined once and for all. You wish you could to something about that…
Now, in a parallel universe “METRO MUSIC” exists and it comes to save your day, your mood, your nerves and most importantly to improve the whole subway experience . It’s all about listening to music inside subway without using your data or without having downloaded songs to your device.
Our idea was great but we had to test if it’s gonna work. We have to do our research, map our potential competitors, and most important will it had an audience? According to our research we draw our personas and we made a customer journey map but of course that wasn’t enough.We really needed to ask real potiential users.
So, we took the streets (no kidding, just houses),and ask as many as possible, future users we could ,what they think about the need to linstening to music in the subway. Also, we desinged our “Value Proposition Canvas” (which by the way changed a lot as our research was moving on) and right after we knew it was time to draw the “Buisness Model Canvas” which involves our value proposition, key activities, customer relatioships, customer segmentation, revenue streams,distribution channels, key recources, infrastructure costs, key partnerships.
Value Proposition Canvas
The Buisness Model Canvas
Our Value Proposition: We try to solve the need for music in subway and subway stations. Now, there is no way to listen to music inside subway unless you already downloaded songs, listen to a specific radio station or own a rather expensive app. The whole idea involves the creation of an app that in cobination with the servers installed inside subway station, will provide users with music due to their rides charging the lowest possible fee.
Key Activities: Our team’s suggestion belongs to “Need Solving” buisnesses, beacause listening to music in the subway isn’t a problem but a need a solution , is what peolple ask for to improve their subway experience.
Customer Relationships: In order to ensure our relatioships with the customers we will provide them, at first, with the one month “Free Trial” to engage with our product. Also, considering that our target group includes high school and university students we are going to adjust the anual or monthly subcription to fit their needs. Further discounts will be given to the users who suggested our product to their friends. Another, suggestion would be to send a “Welcoming” message through our prototype to users just in time they enter each subway station.
Customer Segments: Our target group are basically music lovers who are living in the city (Athens in this case),they are avid smartphone users and they are frequent subway users. In addition to this, their age can be somewhere between 15–50 years old, males and females with or without monthly income.
Distribution Channels: In this case the distribution channels could be considered the application itself as well as the servers inside subway stations.
Revenue Streams: A very important factor in oder the vision to be sustainable is how we are planning to make money. Firstly, a typical monthly subscription around 3–5 euros is a very good solution in order not only to make it affodable for the users, but also to be profitable for itself. Extra tip: Accoriding to our quantitative research we found out that the 65% would think to pay a fee of 3–5euros for an app like this. In addition to this, are planning to use veiled adverts to have a second source of income. Veiled adverts could be new songs that will pop-up like suggestions/notifications to the users so as to listen them.These adverts would be paid by record companies/ upcomming artists in order to raise awareness and their songs’ popularity. Another way to make money is add a (difficult but not impossible) feature to our application that throughout an algorithm that will run and in cooperation with the users’ location in the subway, it will suggest places(bars, clubs,restaurants), that play the users’ favourite(most played) kind of music. The recommended places(bars, clubs,restaurants) will pay to be suggested to the our users.
Cost Structure: The most important cost is the special sever construction and installation( thre areapproximately 60 subway stations in Athens). The second most important cost is the application build up.
Key Resources: The special modified servers that are going to be installed at the subway stations and an army(no, not an army, just a very passionate team) of software engineers are the me main key resources we need, expect the finance factor of course.
Key Partnerships: Last but not least, we have to consider with who we are going to be partners. First, of the subway itself (Attiko Metro) this is the most vital and at the same time the most difficult partership. Other partnerships, are the record companies/upcomming artists that they want their new songs to be featured as suggestions to app users. The same thing is happening as far as the bars,clubs,restaurants/music places are concerned that they are going to be feature as suggestions as well.
After having all these tasks checked, the only thing missing is to bring “METRO MUSIC” to life. We’ ve made a proto.io prototype of our app and got in touch with potential users.
Costumer Journey Map
After having all these tasks checked and the Costumer Journey Map, drawn, the only thing missing is to bring “METRO MUSIC” to life. We’ ve made a proto.io prototype of our app and got in touch with potential users.We have tried to make our prototype according Hueristics in order to be user friendly and providing the best user experience possible.
Guerrila Usability Testing
After the construction of the prototype we ask from 3 potential users to perform it in order to find out how user-friendly is and test the user experience.
We ask the users to execute 3 tasks:
Findings: Overall our prototype seem to be easy to use. (yeyy)
B’N’B team
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The team B’N’B: varvara pantazopoulou Nefeli Staikoura
The teachers: Betty Tsakarestou, Domnika Skreta
