Discovering new music is an experience for me like little other. It’s exciting. It’s stimulating. When I find some amazing new music, I spread its gospel to whomever will listen.
When I was doing my Masters, I spent long nights alone in front of the computer. In between studying my disjointed notes and designing wireframes, I browsed Youtube, much as one would browse through records in a record store. But unlike a record store, on Youtube I could listen to music with no more effort than it took me to look at it.
I spent hours wandering through the weird and the wonderful, coming across gems, but also a lot of crap.
Moondog, an odd spectacle of a man, was one of the gems I came across. His music, which ranged from odd chants, to classical compositions, to child-like rhymes, all were composed with utter virtuosity. I found out more by Googling him — he was homeless often, and would stand on New York street corners in a horned Viking helmet. An outsider musician, he was called (a fascinating subject in its own right).
This discovery was based on a digital structure that contributed to exploration, but also relied heavily on my curiosity.
The system’s algorithms showed attractive album covers of artists that were somehow related. This structure was similar to having a music store guy next to you, saying “You like that? Well check out this,” and handing you an album.
Of course, the digital curation that invisibly hands you an album on Youtube is much more difficult to trust than a living, breathing human. Users still don’t know how or why an album is being recommended to them. You could ask a record store clerk how an album might be similar to one another — you can’t do this with Youtube, let alone Spotify or other music streaming services.
I don’t know why Moondog appeared to me, I couldn’t ask Youtube. It was simple serendipity that I clicked. I didn’t know what to expect or what I was stepping into. It’s not a stretch to say that users have difficulty conceptualising what they are listening to. What genre are they listening to? How is one genre or band related to another?
This worrying lack of these ability is apparent in one of the most popular music streaming services — Spotify.
I love Spotify for the breadth of music on the site — but they provide almost no ability for users to understand or utilise metadata.
As depicted above, there’s a “Related Artists” section, but it provides no context of the relationship. How and why is an artist related to another? There isn’t even any information on the ‘related artist’, other than a photo of them.
Spotify’s “Discover Weekly” feature, while useful, does not help users understand the context of what they are listening to either — the genre, how artists are related, or even just general information about the bands you are ‘discovering’.
What’s worse, Spotify’s feature of searching for genres (or other descriptors of music) is highly limited. On searching on a genre, users are presented with a selection of curated playlists that involve the genre (at least according to whomever is curating the playlist).
You can’t search by genres or see what genre a particular song or artist is. This is frustratingly disempowering to the user, provides very little in the way of supporting their personal exploratory searches, and gives them little to no model of how genres are linked to one another.
Perhaps more importantly, users aren’t equipped with the language of music. They aren’t educated about music.
Nearly the polar opposite is Netflix — who has some 76,897 categories used to describe movies. This hyper-categorisation is unparalleled. It involves extremely specific genres — “Mind-bending Cult Horror Movies from the 1980s”, “Visually-striking Goofy Action & Adventure” — that empowers the user to find movies that reflect what they want at any given time. It also provides them with the lexicon to describe the genres they like. This helps structure a mental model of their tastes, and how how genre might interrelate with one another.
Tagging such as this requires a massive team of people, who, provided with guidelines, can watch and tag various movies. Yet it is enormously effective for allow users to explore and understand genres.
There’s no reason that this can’t exist with music. There are far more songs then there are movies— but there’s no reason that this task can’t be allocated to the hive mind of music listeners.
Take a look at the wireframe I’ve developed below. It’s a rough concept of a how music could be structured around genres. The bars next to albums, musicians and songs represent how much of each genre is present in each song, which is colour-coded with the tags listed above.
Conceptualising genres in this way allows users to grasp and form concrete associations of the various genres at play. Users can self-curate.
Music is notoriously hard to understand for the non-musical. How is baroque different from classical? What’s the difference between grime and jungle? By listening to the music and forming associations, users can answer these questions. Users need not wonder why various artists or songs are recommended — they can see that one song or artist has a good deal in common with another one.
You’ll also see ‘News’ and a description of the artist, album or genre (depending on what page the user is on) in the screenshot above. Spotify is decidedly lacking in information about musicians, and thus users are left with a plethora of questions about the music. Who are they? When did they last release an album?
Shouldn’t we help users conceptualise the music they are listening to?
The increased information I’m suggesting might be described as a form of helping to ground the phenomenology of music. Users are provided with the terms and descriptors of music, enabling them to understand how they experience the music. When users are comfortable in describing music, in conceptualising how it sits in their life-world, they are comfortable in exploring. More obscure genres start to open up them.
But, epistemological considerations aside, had Youtube been able to describe Moondog’s eccentricities and fascinating life, I would never have had to leave the site. The ROI is staring you in the face.
In the video below, I use Nihls Fram as an example. A user, exploring, could click on an album by Nihls, then connect him to a particular genre — classical ambient — then see what artists are in that particular genre. If they liked Nihls piano music in particular, they might want to listen to Olafar Arnalds, because, as the bars show, Olafar’s music is highly piano-oriented.
The connections that users can make — by moving from artist, to genre, to another artist — would be unparalleled. In doing this, users not only discover more, they also formulate stronger mental models of what a particular musical genre sounds like. They can be more confident in how to explore, in discussing music, in inspecting its intricacies. Again, engaging users and making them feel confident in exploring is it’s own ROI.
Digital music is itself divorced from the instruments, from the artists, even from other listeners. Unlike older forms of music — tape, cd and record players — it doesn’t involve tools that are exclusive to just listening to music. We’re passive receptors who are often distracted and are at best barely inclined to listen to new artists.
Empowering users to see how and why songs and artists are recommended or curated strengthens them to explore and listen. This is not to eliminate curiosity and serendipity, but rather work with it. In essence, it allows users to explore music with a map, rather than just a flashlight.