Music streaming has offered the music industry and its artists a unique way to share and distribute music with consumers across the world. The technology has been created alongside to support these services which are forecasted to rise and become the most profitable digital music format in the U.S. As per 2017 statistics, 41% of Americans’ time spent listening to music was via streaming.
Let’s find out the type of streaming services available in the market.
Streaming Services in the Market
The streaming services can be broadly categorized into radio and on-demand services. Radio stations are mainly associated with music discovery and have licensing agreements that restrict them to play music on demand, making on-demand music streaming services a more appealing option that let users play songs of their choice instantly. No surprise, on-demand streaming accounted for 69% of all R&B/hip-hop music consumption in the US in 2017 with mobile devices being the most popular platform. Let’s try to understand how these on-demand solutions work.
On-Demand Music Streaming Services
The lineup for the music streaming services is huge with Spotify, Apple Music, Tidal, Pandora and Amazon Music being some of the top contenders. These services, like the radio services, offer recommendation and discovery features to understand user’s preferences and generate recommended playlists. The ways that these services accomplish this include:
1. The User Onboarding Process: For a new app, the easy way to understand users’ choices is to use Facebook’s API to get access to their likes and dislikes or to get a short questionnaire filled in as soon as a user logs in. Apps use this to get a taste of what kind of music their users will like and tailor their offerings accordingly. In the long-run, they get enough data to understand their users’ choices.
2. Tapping the User behavior: Companies tap their users’ behavior over time to create a user profile based on the songs, artists, albums, the genre they prefer or listen to, and based on the choices they make during the onboarding process. However, what sets apart the various on-demand music streaming services is the app design choices, the content and features they offer and most importantly, the personalized playlists they generate that hits the spot with their users. This needs a more advanced system for recommendations and discovery.
3. Using Algorithms for Deeper Analysis: Generating personalized lists requires complex algorithms that can capture and analyze the available tracks for deeper behavioral analysis. Apps like Spotify and Apple Music use AI, machine learning and technical expertise to offer users their preferred music. Similarly, Pandora builds user playlists using various machine learning algorithms combined with raw radio analysis from the music genome, filtering methods and in-house editorial curation.
This is simply an overview of how streaming services work, however, with enhanced competition and cutting edge technologies, the streaming market is getting harder to penetrate. If you’re planning to launch your app, approach the best app development companies that can offer you high-end technology and the requisite expertise at a nominal cost. To add to this complexity, the laws are not that helpful too. Let us check out the legal side of these services too.
Legalities Stymieing Streaming Services
To make music streaming app, companies need to sign contracts or licensing agreements for sound recordings and compositions and pay royalties for reproducing or making copies of recordings and compositions. The content needs to be licensed from Major labels as Sony Music, Universal Music Group and Warner Bros; from independent aggregators like Merlin Network; from publishers as Sony/ATV who offer licenses based on a revenue percentage, per-stream rate, advance payment for future streams or equity. The problem is the lack of global standards for music licensing, and the reluctance of big labels to sign deals with low profit newly emerging services.
Conclusion
The on-demand music streaming services have become a popular choice for music lovers in the US, attracting high revenues. This has made the streaming market highly competitive involving complex algorithms and cutting-edge technologies to analyze user behavior and offer customized playlists. However, the absence of global music licensing standards and the unwillingness of major players to sign low-profit deals have made things difficult for the new players.
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