A brief introduction to Musical Innovations
Ever since the invention of the microphone it seems like technological innovations change the way how humans consume the art of the ears. Soon after the microphone, during the great depression, magnetic tape and vinyl records hit the markets. A couple of years later a German inventor created the first marketable tape recorder. Skip 20 years, our world was introduced to the portable radio. Now, skip to 1970s Sony revolutionized the world with ‘The Walkman’, an innovation directed to individual enjoying its music tastes. Between the 1970s and the 2000s, major technological advances moved from the development of the portable Walkman to CDs, the worldwide web, professional tools, MP3 players and Auto-Tune. These have been major leaps forward, similar to technological leaps in many other consumer goods industries. Music had been spreading like wildfire, the inception of the IPod further pushed the boundaries. Steve Jobs and rivals started acquiring electronic platforms in order to make music production more widely accessible and viable. Lastly, nearing the end of the first decade of the new millennia platforms such as SoundCloud and Spotify started providing their music streaming services.
Steaming Platforms: the Netflix of Music
The ease of music consumption that music streamers provides nowadays, would be Alien-like five decades ago. SoundCloud offers free access to its contents online. However, with poor governance, the platform saw many artists move away. The poor governance was due to a major redesign in 2012 which introduced the ‘repost’ feature that led to the platform opening up and integrating with social media. Consequently, artists abused the feature by constantly reposting their own tracks. Similarly, people abused this feature and started offering paid reposts which led to misrepresentation of the actual picture. While negative feedback loops were affecting SoundCloud, another major streaming service took the throne, namely Spotify.
Spotify, a Swedish based music platform, is changing the game of the music industry today. The company’s valuation is reported around $16 billion dollars. One of the ways the company got here is through its major asset ‘recommended playlists’. After individual track searches, these are the second most popular transaction in the platform. You can basically find any playlist targeted to any music preference on the platform. This aspect makes the move to mono-homing more likely for its users.
Continuous Innovation Rise
Recently, Spotify announced a further technological differentiation strategy; Rise. Through the rise program the platform hopes to expand its long-tail even further by discovering ‘new music stars’. The company will hand-pick artists and will aid there breakthrough through social promotion, a special form of marketing. Hopefully our ears will be blessed with new beautiful music!
References:
https://www.theverge.com/2017/7/21/15999172/soundcloud-business-model-future-spotify-streaming
