Midseason Recap
A quick overview of what has been done so far
The first thing to remember is: my thesis topic is around music. In the beginning, I was super interested to know more about people’s relationship with music and how it has been changing in recent years.
Music is super important to me, but I really think it is incredibly important for humans, in general. Music is found in every known society, past and present, and is considered to be universal culture. It is a universal language. All people of the world, including the most isolated tribal groups, have some form of music.
I truly believe that a better relationship with music can help us identify how it affects our emotions and help us use it in a more objective and effective way.
Throughout the last weeks, I’ve been doing desktop research and conducting interviews to understand better my problem space. And through this research, I learned a lot of things:
Streaming is changing how music is made.
Due to the way monetization works, producers, composers, and songwriters have changed the way they make music. The songs started to be shorter and many of them bet all their chips in the initial moments, sometimes even starting with the chorus.
Music can serve a lot of purposes.
Music can play different roles. It can be a means for concentration, purely for leisure, a performance enhancer, a motivation for the completion of hard tasks, a way of reliving past memories, a mood changer, a reality check, something to dance for, and so on.
It is not about what you want to hear, it is about feelings.
People choose songs based on moods: their current mood or the mood they want to achieve.
Music can change our emotions.
Music can be — and often is — designed to generate emotions in the listener.
Knowledge changes perception.
When we learn something about an artist, an album, or a song, it affects the way we perceive it and the way we interpret it.
Through my research (especially through the interviews) I also found a few common pain points related to music:
Connections with music are getting weaker.
Streaming services are contributing to context-free music. According to Alan Cross, music is becoming organized noise. Also, the fact that we are paying for access to millions of music and not for specific albums or songs, make us see less value in songs or albums individually.
The likelihood of looking for novelty is decreasing.
There are tens of millions of music to our disposal, leading us to the Overchoice Phenomenon (when making a decision becomes overwhelming due to the many potential outcomes and risks that may result from making the wrong choice), thus, making us decide on safe choices, and consequently, less likely to look for new songs. Not only we are more likely to choose songs that we know, but we are really prone to skip the songs we don’t know (35% drop before reaching 30 seconds of a song).
There is no neutral listener.
A song has different meanings according to the listener, the context, and the associations built. These meanings are stronger than the original intention of the song.
It is hard to learn music.
Most respondents took music lessons at some point in the past but dropped out.
It is hard to explain why we like something.
It is difficult to define musical styles and understand what makes a song fall into one category and not another. People group songs by similarity without necessarily knowing how to explain what is similar between two songs. Classifications can sometimes have more connections with cultural or geographic and temporal movements than with sound aspects.
As I was learning through my research, I started understanding better the user groups I was interested in.
Millennials and Gen Zers are the groups I decided to focus on. The first, because they went to analogic means of music reproduction until this new reality of streaming music on the internet (they are the ones that lived all the recent changes). The latter, because they were “born inside” this new way of listening to music. This dichotomy is really intriguing to me.
I also dedicated part of my research to a subgroup inside this group: Millennials and Gen Zers suffering from anxiety. I interviewed some people that have anxiety problems and that use music as part of their treatment and I decided to investigate if there were ways of touching this subject.
Another part of my research was in the competition space. I looked at some potential competitors (and even some indirect competitors) in two main categories: products to listen to music and products for mood and anxiety control.
The last part of this work so far was coming up with ideas for products in this problem space. I created ideas that somehow would help to build more meaningful connections to music.
Building meaningful connections to music through information
A service focused on musical information
Focusing on a rich musical experience, the idea is to have information about the artists, the albums, the songs, and everything involving an artist or group. Having lyrics, behind the scenes, a timeline of events, curiosities, etc. Offering a monthly highlight, that can be physical or digital.
Building meaningful connections to music through a reflection about music and how it affects you
A service focused on mapping the link between current mood and the desired one
A service that tries to curated music for you based on how it affects your mood and your emotions. Focused on users with anxiety, depression, and other problems that can benefit from the right musical choice.
Building meaningful connections to music through a better understanding of music itself
A service focused on deepening musical understanding
A platform that focuses on showing the instruments behind a song, when they are played, and that lets you mix the instruments while listening to it.
Building meaningful connections to music through a multi-sensorial experience to fight anxiety
A device that uses sounds and lights to help people with anxiety
A device that can shape your environment to help you deal with anxiety and to help you meditate.
That is my thesis recap. We have a few more weeks to go in this semester and I am still curious to see where it will land. Next week we will be back with new episodes. See you then.
