I wrote up a guide to essential music apps for you iPhone users who, you know, listen to music & stuff. Perhaps you've heard of Spotify and Soundcloud, but may I please introduce you to FlickTunes, 8Tracks, iCrates and Bandcamper?
About a year ago I got one of my many entrepreneurial itches and decided I wanted to create a better version of iTunes. After dreaming up what a social music service would look like, I stumbled across Spotify. Unfortunately for me, Daniel Ek was about 4 years ahead of me and designed exactly what I would I would picture as the ideal music sharing service. So much for that. To make it worse, I had to sit around and wait for 6 months until they FINALLY came to the states. From day one, I was slinging Spotify to all my friends, and apparently there was a lot of that going around considering how the service spread like wildfire across the country. Spotify is the best music service I’ve found and the $9.99 that I spend on it a month are by far the most over worked dollars in my monthly budget. I literally listen to about 4-6 hours worth of music per day. That being said, I have some ideas on how they could make it even better.
Song Recommendations. The evolution of new music discovery is making it easier and easier to find new bands and customize our listening experience with greater ease each passing day. It would be even better if Spotify could make my music discovery process even better by delivering new tracks and artists to me, either in the form of something like a “Song of the Day” delivered to my inbox or a customized playlist based on my listening history. Granted, the integration with Last.fm is a start at doing this, but I’m still not sold on the interface and cross pollination of songs between the two. Remember, I’m the selfish consumer that wants everything.
Friend Recommendations. Spotify knows what I’m listening to, and knows who my friends are and what they’re listening to. I have a group of about 7 or 8 friends that I constantly share music with, but I have a thousand-ish Facebook friends, at least some of which share similar musical interests. Why not use this information to connect like-minded users. Take it a step further and create a music compatibility aspect among Spotify users. If I knew that a random one of my friends was “90% compatible” with my listening habits, I would very likely add them to my favorites. Further, music is unique in that it connects people outside of the virtual world; meaning that Spotify can serve as a stimulant to offline interactions and relationship building. You could even take it to another level and provide a small scale dating service through music tastes. I understand that maybe not everyone cares about music enough to affect their dating preferences, and this might be too small of a niche to garner Spotify’s attention, but it’s still a nice thought.
I also want lesser known artists. For those people passionate about music (and sharing), it’s very rewarding to introduce your friends to new songs that they fall in love with. The good feeling multiplies if they haven’t even heard of the band yet. One idea would be to partner with ReverbNation to help me find those under the radar artists that might fit my fancy. Another option for this kind of discovery is the mobile Bandcamper app. Basically I want Spotify to tell me what I want to listen to.
Outbox. I would really like an outbox to show me what songs I’ve sent people. I mean my Spotify inbox works exactly like Outlook, so why can’t we add a “Sent” function so I can tell when I’ve sent a song to one of my friends already?
Let’s Cut out the Middleman. I want to avoid getting overly MBA-ish and talking too much business strategy and my apologies to the establishment, but what’s the real purpose of the major record labels anymore? Promote concerts and take more than their fair share of the cut from Spotify and the musicians? Spotify is very quickly achieving the scale necessary to promote bands within their user base, and the concept of paying the major labels seems redundant, so I wonder if somewhere in their business model the idea of becoming a next generation label is addressed. I’ll likely be doing a follow up post on this one.
So is all this too much to ask? Probably not. I understand Spotify is relatively new and needs to prioritize certain features over others, but hopefully they are looking for user feedback on things they can improve. I for one am completely sold on Spotify and use it every day. I’m also super excited to watch the company evolve and what new musical joys that it brings me as it does.
