Songza is a music discovery app for desktop, mobile, and tablet — though I mostly use it on my phone.
Its killer app is the Concierge, pictured above. Instead of predominantly surfacing recommendations based on my past listening history, or my friends, or my blogs, or whatever, Songza lets me find music I want to listen to based on the mood and temporal setting I’m currently in. It’s a brilliant human answer to the real human question of “how do I find music I want to play next?”
I’m not the only one who thinks this is great. Lots of people are copying the idea. Like Martha Stewart, for example. (Obviously!)
There’s another real human problem which I think Songza, Rdio, Spotify, Pandora, and the rest of the gang of mobile music apps brush up against: They all generally rely on a steady internet connection to stream music. Which is fine when I’m at my home or workplace, but a nightmare when I’m mobile, and invariably I have to walk into a stairwell, elevator, tunnel, subway, tauntaun carcas…you get it.
How do you solve this?
Rdio & Spotify handle this with their unlimited and premium plans, respectively, which each cost $10/mo and let you sync or download playlists you want directly to your device so no internet connection is required.
You could also buy an album, and upload that to your device. But jeez, it’s 2013. That’d be embarrassing.
There’s little nuanced things which I don’t like about the solutions above.
- You’ve got to consciously decide which specific songs you want. And consciously curate a new album/playlist every time you want something new.
- At some point, you’ll have to delete things.
The two things above really don’t amount to much more than little chores. You wouldn’t break a sweat doing them. They’re really stupid human problems. But we might as well fix them.
Here’s what I’d build if I were Songza: the ability to proactively pre-load/buffer a playlist to my device for a while before heading off. I hit “pre-load” five minutes before setting off on my run, tie my shoes or something, and then after five minutes I’m out the door — with a five minute buffer to spare for that one annoying forest-y part of my run where I always seem to lose signal.
You’ve already employed this practice a million times before. Consider the last time you tried watching a YouTube video somewhere with a really poor internet connection. You’d hit pause, let it load a few minutes while you did something else, and came back once the grey bar progressed enough that you wouldn’t be continually interrupted by the “Buffering” spinner.
Monetization seems natural:
- A 30 second buffer is free and makes the experience better for everyone.
- A $5 monthly subscription allows me up to a 30-minute buffer, which I can use on my commute.
- Maybe a $10 monthly subscription nets me something way longer (up to my device’s spare storage capacity) so I can use this on a flight.
And of course, my stream deletes itself automatically as I listen to it, or once I’ve closed the app (same way you’d need to reload your YouTube video if you close the window). No more chores on my part.
I can’t imagine legality to be a real issue here, because of the fact that you can already engage in this sort of behavior with YouTube. And because at this point, a sophisticated & motivated computer user can probably steal any music they want at any point, anyway. Maybe there’s a technical/logistical/legal issue with buffer speeds…perhaps you’re only allowed to buffer songs in real time (so, if you want a 15-minute buffer, you’d need to start the pre-load a full 15-minutes beforehand instead of just loading as fast as your internet speed allows). But I don’t see this being a real barrier to usage. I could arguably quite easily get into the habit of queuing up my Songza as I set my alarm clock the night before my run.
I wouldn’t be surprised if some small amount of buffer like this was already invisibly built in to the Songza app. I can understand why the app might not have a progress bar like YouTube does — it’s clutter, considering the mobile app has less screen real estate and considering you can’t really scroll through a radio stream the same way you’d scroll through a YouTube video. But build this in as an explicit feature, and you’ve got a unique (patentable?) distinction from the rest of the pack. It also might be nice to veer away from advertising/no-advertising as the only track for revenue.