This point and the point about subscription model is so spot on. Giving users a wallet to spend, and also letting them earn credits, share and gift credits etc. This could lead to a lot of creative promotional uses of gifting credits between listeners and artists! Subscription models do tend to work well across many platforms. I think we are on the right track!
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In the topic if ‘lack of control over spending’ it would be nice to have a “do not play” list / filter.
for example it could be framed like:
- don’t play tracks from artist x / label z
- it could be like an anti-favorite list
This would save credits if you’re in random discovery mode and you don’t find the skip button in the 45 seconds you need to save you listening to a track you have already discovered and don’t like
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Yeah some services have a “Never Play Again” button, which can be unticked later. I think it was Last.fm player that used to have it if I am recalling correctly.
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I don’t understand the desire to have a track paid for within just 9 plays. Why the rush? Pay-to-own is a cool concept but 9 plays seems so fast. It makes it feel more like a “try before you buy” setup than a replacement for streaming. You can’t just leave it on like a normal streaming service; it would get quite expensive fast.
I feel like just having something like, “1 cent per play until you own it” is more palatable. It’s much more clear to understand for everyone and doesn’t make you feel like you have to carefully curate everything you’re hearing. As an artist, I would not mind at all if someone listened to one of my tracks 50 times and “only” got paid 50 cents. I would make more money from many people just casually listening than few people making me a favorite.
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I think 1 cent per play is a fine idea - perhaps though there’d be a way to incorporate that concept with the escalating model already built into Resonate? I think it’s rare or at least takes quite a while for most songs to reach 100 listens per a single user even if that user really likes the song, and from a user perspective I think it’s helpful to have a collection that you distinctly own as a direction from which to explore more music.
Would it be possible to take a page out of the book out how bandcamp tracks listening stats and incorporate checkpoints based on percentage of song length?
The way they classify listening stats:
-
less than 10% of song == “skip”
-
10% to 90% == “partial”
-
more than 90% == “complete”
I’ll preface this by saying I’m not an expert in this subject but I’ve noticed the following in trying to study the way they track stats:
At each of these checkpoints during a play, the site makes a GET request with a URL that includes “&stream_duration=&phase=______”
Where the underscores are would be one of the following words: “thirty”, “partial”, “complete” or “stream_end” to indicate how far into the song the current play has reached, and the response is a 1x1 gif image. Though I’ve never seen a stat provided to an artist account that corresponds with the thirty second play phase, it may factor into the mechanism that determines how many plays on an individual release before bandcamp sends a user the prompt that encourages them to purchase a music release.
Long story short, perhaps factoring play-tracking that’s proportional to song-length could help with combining the concept of charges that escalate towards song-ownership with each play but in a way that is less On/Off anxiety-inducing than only having that 45 second mark?
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I think rather than designing one model that fits all purposes, it’s better to have multiple.
A line could, for example, be drawn between “specific playing” and “unspecific playing”. If I search up a specific track, that I might have heard elsewhere (which naturally happens all the time) I think the current S2O model is great. I can add the track to my playlist, maybe listen once, and if I happen to never listen to it again then I didn’t lose much. On the other hand, if I do, then I know the artist is fairly compensated and I end up owning it which feels good since that means I can’t lose it (like when artists pull their music because of politics).
Now, when it comes to unspecific playing, such as playing some sort of automixed radio station, or being in some discovery mode where my ability to play specific tracks is limited, it would indeed be nice if I instead paid something more similar to a typical royalty deal. E.g. a cent per play per track, or perhaps even just a fixed monthly fee. I don’t think this is unfair to the artist nor to the user.
It would encourage discovery, provide a way for users to play background music, but also make it possible to save specific tracks easily and play them later using the S2O scheme.
A final thing I’d also like to mention is that some of the listener behaviors detailed in this thread, and also detailed on other parts of this community forum, is naturally not what I would consider “mainstream” behaviors. The vast majority of Spotify subscribers discover music either through their “radio” stations, or elsewhere (and then look up/add those songs on Spotify). I don’t think their behavior is more complex than that. Resonate’s current model already covers the latter case, it’s just the unspecific discovery case it’s not as suitable/useful for.
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