Three years back when we first started discussing about the power of music to change the perception of a society and how it can impact the thinking capabilities associated with it, we never thought that smartphones were going to be the next big thing. We have come a long way from then to now. We have apps for anything and everything now, crazy to a certain level that there is an app that even tracks where you pooped a year back!
Music has been the one thing that has always influenced humans right from the time of Beethoven to Michael Jackson to Eminem to Justin Bieber. In today’s world, where you have the power to switch from one playlist to the other in the flick of a second, comes the power of content that goes along with it. What if the content that you are subjected to is aligned with the music that you are listening to? Algorithms, they have the power to move big data and put it to use for anyone who wants to build stuff that disrupts. We have seen algorithms that change the way people view images, videos, the way people travel, the way they purchase.
Music surpasses all of these because it has a certain cognitive factor associated with it, that directly puts the user to take action when subjected to a certain BPM (Beats per minute), the same way a person gets pumped up when he is at a concert with loud music and a mad crowd. The BPM, when bundled around an interesting algorithm can give you results that might not have been thought of before, one can build communities, push curated content, videos and what not. The cognitive element takes an upper hand in getting the user to respond to any of the inputs based on the frequency of the BPM he is exposed to.
Algorithms that can disrupt the behavior of the user is the next thing and that is definitely going to bring in a long-term engagement for any app out there. Be it building a community or pushing ads. Startups today value their workforce that believes in the algorithm first and then build on top of it to make it et al, be it user friendliness, engagement or purpose.
When an app or a service or a web app is subjected to a user after years of research to do one particular task, it often gets pivoted to a next level that not even its founders would have thought of. The perfect example of that would-be Instagram, which was supposed to be a check in app that later pivoted itself to be the top mobile photo sharing app. The algorithm still hasn’t changed, it’s the use case that jumped to the next level giving more power to the user in the form of hashtags, videos and now even ads to brands. Algorithms that has changed the world over the years have evolved, there are still hundreds of algorithms that goes unnoticed to the elite VCs and angel funders.
Music is one section that still goes unnoticed in the segment of apps. The last one that might have disrupted the Play Store would be SoundCloud, which is going through one of the roughest phases currently even after being the top audio streaming app in the world. If the algorithms that run these music apps are put to right use, we believe it has the power to change the perception of its users. Quality content and ads that are pushed to the right audience, which prefer a particular genre of music, could provide insightful data. It could create and manage communities that can take a leap forward. It could be the next big leap.