Welcome to the blog of Vincent and Frédéric, co-founders of Musicovery.
We are starting here series of articles regarding music recommendation, metadata and music services UX.
At Musicovery, we have been working on those issues for the last 13 years, as a streaming service and as a recommendation engine and have a few experiences to share with you.
From your music service you would expect several points of entry for starting a listening experience: genres/moods/activities, new releases, navigation around artists similar to your favorite artists, extending an existing playlist,...
But how to define a good recommendation ? How to measure it ? is it the same as satisfaction ? Does similarity provide a good basis for recommendation ? What can UI add to plain recommendation metadata to provide a better experience ?
How to describe music to provide adequate information for indexing songs by mood, activities. What about collecting playlist metadata from the API of major streaming platforms (Spotify, Deezer,...) ?
No innovative graphic user interface succeeded in becoming a mainstream service, in music or other type of service. Is there a place for an innovative service in the future ?
We will address issues like bubble filters, recommendation UX, recommendation and playlists models, quality of descriptive metadata.
How do the major streaming services compare on recommendation engine, recommendation UX, metadata quality ?
What are the major limits to music listening experience: the time that a listener can dedicate to the experience ? his eagerness to discover ? the UX of the services ?
What is the ultimate goal of a music service providers: to keep listeners longer ? to provide the highest satisfaction level for each minute spent on a service ?
"Our analysis relies on a thorough and methodological benchmark of the major music services providers."
We will endeavour to answer those questions in the posts published in these series.
We strongly encourage you to comment, raise questions, provide contradiction and insights, discuss.
If you want to work on an innovative product, contact us, we can provide our API and UX advice. Our analysis relies on a thorough and methodological benchmark of the major music services providers.
