Proposal: "Segue" - Albums autoplay one after the other, based upon user recommendations

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As mentioned in @peter’s post, Resonate is aiming for curation features which:

  • Get listeners streaming more regularly
  • Help them easily find interesting music
  • Build in a cost effective manner
  • Avoid algorithmic-based solutions

After using Resonate for the last month and brainstorming, I’ve come up with some different ideas for music discovery and content curation. The idea which I feel is probably the least work for the biggest reward is a feature I’m nicknaming Segue.

Imagine you are listening to the album Intermission by No Vacation on Resonate. The final song Mind Fields finishes. Normally at this point, the music stops. If you want to listen to more music, you have to go find a new album or return to your Favorites. It’s a bit stark: whatever you were doing, you now have to stop and find a new record.

If you’re new to Resonate and haven’t discovered much stuff you like yet, this can be a big road block. It’s a lot of work to find your footing on Resonate, especially if your favorite artists aren’t on the platform yet.

Instead, imagine a pop-up appears. It says “Intermission has 6 Segues recommended by users. Interested in a follow-up album?” You’ll be given some options:

[Begin Segue]
[Recommend a Segue]
[See all Segues for this album]
[No thanks]

If you [Begin Segue], you’ll be taken to a random album out of the six which those users each recommended. All We Left Behind by Highland Kites starts playing automatically. Someone – some person – in the past recommended it as a good follow-up album to No Vacation.

Now that you have begun Segue mode, it continues until you turn it off again (a Segue On/Off button would be added to the main interface). Every time you finish an album with Segue mode enabled, you will automatically be taken to a user-recommended follow-up album. If you end up on an album which doesn’t have any Segues recommended, then you are invited to recommend one yourself.

Segue is an idea which invites each Resonate user (or perhaps co-op members exclusively as an membership incentive) to act as a kind of radio DJ at the album level. It’s not merely about finding more music to listen to, it’s about picking a specific transition between albums, themes, etc. You are invited to get engaged with the platform, to be creative and personal in each of your Segue proposals (you only get one proposal per album!).

This feature would ease music discovery significantly for listeners without requiring any tagging, genre categorizing or algorithms. Also this eases the work load for current curation volunteers.

Every time a new album comes on through Segue, you know that some other human out there on Resonate listened to the same album you did, and then hand-picked this follow-up album for you. Whether you love the specific Segue album which was recommended or not, that’s a deeply human touch on a streaming platform.

I imagine it would be difficult to implement Segue on a song-to-song level, and it could even be annoying at that point. Implementing it strictly for albums would likely be easier to build, and it would incentivize artists to upload full albums rather than just songs, knowing that only albums can be discovered through Segue. It would also encourage listeners to listen to full albums, which equals more plays on the platform.

Surely there will be people who spam the same album as a Segue on everything they can find for exposure (it’ll be a hell of a lot of work though), and there will be people who intentionally pick bad Segues to be silly. If wanted, that could be curtailed by adding a sort of vote up/down feature to review Segue albums as you are listening to them (perhaps affecting their likelihood of being selected on Segue mode). Not sure if that’s worth it though.

Once again, if desirable, an up/down voting feature could in some way reward users who made well-liked Segue proposals. Perhaps they would receive a tiny portion of the credits used to listen to the album. That’s complicated and more long-term stuff, just brainstorming. Co-op members earning microcredits by making popular Segue recommendations? That’s fancy.

Personally, I would use this feature constantly, even in its most basic implementation. It would be rare for me to turn it off! Segue would make it a lot more fun and interactive to use Resonate. Let me know what you think – or riff on it and propose a variation.

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I think it is a super cool feature that could benefit artists enormously, and at the same time would encourage community contributions and involvement.

If this feature was coupled with the work of curators and anonymous data like which albums are being listened till the last song, it could become a great music discovery feature.

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I love this discussion. I think it is a terrific model. I think it might work for songs too, though I have to say I like the idea of reinforcing the album form as well. I would love for Resonate to support a multiplicity of relationships to music.

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Just to continue brainstorming, I think the Segue system proposed by @Hakanto could benefit from having a specific section in the platform for featured albums, recommended albums or just albums. There are already featured albums, but just in the front page, and only one album is displayed on page load.

I ignore if such a section exists at the moment, or if it is already planned, but I think it might help newcomers know where to go to start listening to albums (and recommending Segues) if the artists he/she knows are not in the platform yet. And it could also be helpful in the event that a user does not like the proposed Segue recommendations for an album.

It should be taken into account that such a section could be controversial, as it might reduce the discovery opportunities of artists whose albums are not present in this section. The beauty of the Segue system, in my opinion, is that it has the potential to give opportunities to any artist and listener to be discovered and to recommend, respectively. So an album section could break it or complement it.

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I agree regarding the transparency of recommendations. Ideally these should be accountable to individuals so different community members can affiliate / or not affiliate with the discovery paths of other members depending on personal alignment of taste or interest. The ideal as I see it is facilitating a disparate multiplicity of pathways. One should be able to piggy back along on someone else’s journey. In this way certain individuals might organically become ‘guides’ for various communities of affinity.

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The “piggy-backing” imagery makes me think of how fun it would be if – once user profiles exist – if you could listen to someone else’s listening history as a quasi radio station. Or better, you’d be listening along with them live as they listen to whatever they are listening to at that moment. Obviously there would privacy adjustments possible on something like this and it could be disabled entirely, or to turn it on/off whenever you like from the main interface.

I like the idea of “hitchhiking” along with another user’s listening as it’s happening. Now that I’m looking into it, Spotify has a similar feature but… I’ve rarely used it. It doesn’t feel or function the way I’m initially imagining. It feels distant.

Could be cool to have a “Broadcasting Now” section on the platform, where you can scroll through some different feeds, see what people are broadcasting and then choose to tag along to find some new stuff. And sure you’re going to find broadcasts which change vibe suddenly and then you’re no longer into it – a [Jump Ship] button could immediately switch you to a different randomly-chosen broadcaster

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Related/unrelated: “label shuffle” should be a thing. Find a label – click [label shuffle] – and then it plays random songs by artists on that label. Easy way to stumble on music

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Yes this reminds me of JBQX. Which has the concept of rooms and people collaborating, with someone stepping up to be DJ. Works only on spotify full subscription though. By the way, JBQX in the Spotify ecosystem is a great example of a platform like Spotify letting other people do their R&D for the core platform owner. Let someone else use their (throttled) API’s and if they get to be successful, the platform ‘eats’ them - they copy their idea or take them over.

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@onapoli: Another interesting idea for me would be that if/when the Segue/Aeria features are implemented into the platform, it would be great that once a user adds an album or track as favourite, a new option appears for them (maybe in the player?) to “suggest” another album/track of their favourites as a next play for any user that listens to that album/track and that has opted into/selected "Segue/Aeria listening mode.

moved from basecamp backlogs

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This rules. I love it! I like the idea of keeping it somewhat an exclusive feature (like maybe limited to just co-op members like you stated), but i’d go a step further and maybe make them finite—so you get a set number of them a month or something. People will be less frivolous with them if that’s the case, I think. Or maybe this is only an option for music in a listener’s collection to ensure that an informed recommendation is made out of genuine fandom between both pieces of music.

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