A few weeks ago, I had the opportunity to attend the always awesome SF Music Tech Conference.
More about the music industry (and why its really in trouble) in a future post, but for today I wanted to riff on something Steve Jang of Soundtracking (previously Imeem) said during his panel on Location Check-ins.
For background, Imeem was one of the early players in the music discovery space. Users would sign-up and both passively track the music they were listening to as well as create playlists to share with other users with the end goal of discovering new music to listen to.
As part of the panel, Steve explained the real issue with explicitly selected interests:
“Users would sign-up and create these amazing aspirational playlists – lots of independent music and off the beaten track bands. But then we would watch what these users were playing in the background and it was usually just Madonna or the new Snow Patrol album on repeat.”
The problem:
- Interests change over time (both in degree and type)
- Consumers are actually really bad at selecting what they like
- There’s no context for that interest (with degree or specific type)
- Users have a view of themselves that may not be entirely true
Life in Beta 