“Friends let friends found startups;
no one wants to rock them to sleep.”
Music discovery is a dead pool of music startups, where zero successes exist. These startups die for a
number of reasons, but mainly due to steep royalties and licensing issues, or the inability to convert a niche product into a
sustainable business. If you look at the music startup sector, there are minuscule profits and fruitless exits. Shift your focus to the sole category of
music discovery and things fair even worse. These services and apps register as blips on the radars of technology writers and receive launch coverage, only
to fall back into obscurity and lay down to die. Some visualize related artists, while others suggest similar songs; none of them reach a mainstream
market. Few executives are so cynical that they will publicly guess how much runway a music startup has left (it’s a very small world). But no one misses
the chance to place a bet in private. Friends let friends found startups; no one wants to rock them to sleep. Even Pandora, the poster-child of online
music, is a spectacular failure, whose days appear to be numbered.
“The only stakeholders that have a ‘music discovery’
problem are the artists whose music isn’t being found.”
The truth is that music discovery isn’t a problem, and it’s not a solution either. Music listeners don’t have trouble figuring out what to listen to; they
simply don’t know what to listen to next. They have more than enough music,
but not enough time to explore it. They enjoy re-listening to their favorite songs. Music startups believe that listeners like to discover music, because
the founding members love to discover music. In search of a killer solution, they reduce an organic and serendipitous process to a robotic and deliberate
exchange. Arguably, the only stakeholders that have a “music discovery” problem are the artists whose music isn’t being found. It’s assumed that masking
this problem as a product and shipping the resulting solution to music listeners works, but it hasn’t. They still discover new songs they enjoy on broadcast radio and
look up music videos on YouTube. Billboard says that music discovery creates “magical moments” that convert casual listeners to paying customers, but it
never questions the demand for the trick or what it pays to be a magician. The only “magical” illusion that music startups have “mastered” to date is the
“vanishing” act.
Music discovery requires a lot of work; no service can do that work for you. Sometimes, the right song falls into your lap at the right time and you manage
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