The Future of Social Networks: Music
I bet the future of social networks is not about texting and sharing images. It’s about music.
Why music?
In social networks users listen to music.
Users stream songs.
Users save songs.
Users create playlists.
Social networks easily lock users as the more songs users save the harder it is to leave the service and therefore lose their music collections.
Listening = liking
Moreover users’ music preferences identify users good enough. It’s like decades ago one could easily say about another person’s character/habbits/identity a lot just by knowing what that person like to read, watch (styles of art works) and listen to. In social networks music preferences are easier to find out since it has nothing to do with users’ privacy. Unlike liking series of images users don’t show publicly what they have listened to so far. That’s why users don’t concern listening to music (hence listening equals liking) while it may bother them to click a like button on one more image even if it’s really satisfies their tastes.
Less users’ efforts = better users
So. Social networks have a powerful tool and users selflessly provide them with all the “materials”. What are the possible ways of further development?
There’re 2 directions (definitely not opposite) worth implementing:
- Music sercive has a huge commercialization potential — data, users, related services — therefore it could improve recommendations according to the needs.
- Music service can be used as a hub to add other vertical services. The example of the hub and its vertical services is Google: its Search is the hub (the main cash cow), and other services, i.e. Chrome, Android OS, etc. are the verticals, which are the Google’s driving value services in its verticaly integrated service (Search — Browser — OS — Devices).
Also music service can be used as one of verticals for a major hub, which is more profitable.
Concerts (monetization)
Here’s a case: a user saved or listened to a lot of songs by his favorite band. The music service has this information. Also it’s connected to other services, for instance, some calendars. Or it integrated different guides to art and entertainment, food and drink, film and things to do (i.e. Time Out).
Also there could be a public page of a concert organizer. Or even that band has its own page on this social network. And this bands is going to have a concert in the city where a user lives. Why not to notify the user?
This could be a great way when talking about targeting in social networks and context advertising. Whereas now ads are mostly shown based on static information (forms filled by users, interests based on subscriptions, etc), this specific types of ads — music shows, concerts, performances — can be shown as highly relevants ads based on songs saved and streamed.
Movies (monetization)
Similar to music performances case. How to predict whether a new movie is interesting for a certain user if he doesn’t post about cinemas and doesn’t save videos?
Well, a user might be a fan of some original soundtracks of certain movies. And if the upcoming movie fit the lines of this movies then it could be a good recommendation. Of course it will be even a better recommendation or an ad if the user followed some movie public pages, authorized on IMDb, liked some motion pictures related posts.
It works both ways:
knowing user’s movie preferences helps to suggest OST songs
Anyway using songs alone it won’t be hard to form the user’s preferences to forecast what movie to recommend. It’s all about genres. An action movie implies a dynamic soundtrack. A melodrama contains romantic songs. Linkin Park songs in the user’s collection may be a trigger to suggest watching new Transformers. These correlations should be digged more with a help of data mining.
Furthermore using social network’s location services it will be able to tell users about the nearist sessions of this movie or suggest to like the movie’s public page.
Music service is a starting point for other services,
also it is an audience data source
Weather (verticals)
Is it raining outside? Then it’s time for romantic song collections.
Sunny? Let’s sing Boney-M.
Using the music service as a hub allows to integrate, for example, the weather service. It is a two-way vertical road. The service knows the current weather and recommend users relevant playlists (also location matters). And if the service knows the user started to listen to a street-related playlist, i.e. “travel to work” or “a morning run”, it may want to tell him about the weather outside.
Geolocation (verticals)
Better music recomendations are possible if the music service knows the user’s location, particularly his current and future ones.
Since the service knows user’s habbits it could suggest more relevant songs when it’s time to go jogging.
Another case — the user hangs out at a bar or a cafe. The service got the location and depending on the local time (day/night) suggests relevant songs, i.e. lounge music.
That are not the only advantages social networks can extract from users’ music preferences, knowing what songs they save, what they stream a lot, what they streamed last time and even what they stream right now and adding the overall information as what music band public pages users subscribed to.
