A Holistic Social Music Network
Experiment 7: Listening together, quality over quantity, making friends not connections.
Timeline
March 2021 — October 2021
But Why?
Although Discord gave us a hacky fix to help people form genuine connections over music, it was not a holistic solution at all. We wanted tighter control over the social experience of users to build a space where being authentic and vulnerable is very organic.
Everytime we attempted to build a real life social solution, covid completely destroyed our plans. Staying digital for the near future seemed like the more logical decision.
Earlier we had a huge bias against digital social connections, but in the pandemic we saw people become really close friends online. Our perspective shifted even further when we ran our own Discord server, and saw people interact in a truly wholesome manner. We realised that digital connections are as real as physical ones.
We didn’t want to be restricted to a small Discord community, our goal was to build a social music platform that everyone can use. Our platform already had solo music listening, music sharing and IRL listening together; the only thing missing was a way for people to meet each other online and have shared experiences. Furthermore, the feature that saw the best traction in the pandemic was allowing people to listen in sync. Merging virtual group listening with the existing functionality in the app felt like the perfect solution to scale our presence across digital reality, boost growth and the freshness of social connections.
Experiment
We basically ended up recreating the entire group listening experience of Discord on our app, and enabled support for the 3 major streaming apps: Spotify, Apple Music and YouTube. Users could now listen in sync, and chat at the same time. Unlike Discord, the entire chat was designed for music listening hangouts, and made the experience much richer. We created two types of group listening experiences:
Hangout sessions : An extension of solo listening. Users can start a session whenever they want, and set the visibility to either private, close friends, friends, or public. Until someone joins, the experience remains like a solo mode. As soon as someone joins, the algorithm starts playing music from everyone’s common library. We believed that this would ensure people are not starting group sessions for validation, but because they want to listen to music; if people join fine, if they don’t then also fine.
Scheduled sessions: Always public by default. Users can schedule a session for later, other users see it on their home page, and can sign up for the session if they like. When the session starts, all the registered users get notified, and can tune in. This we believed would be super important when users are sure that they want a communal listening experience, and don’t just want to listen alone.
Based on our learnings from our Discord bot, we made several modifications to the queue:
It’s fair by default. Rather than being chronological, it prefers tracks from people whose music has played the least.
Hosts exercise massive control over the queue. They can drag tracks in up next, and decide the order in which music plays. Moreover, they can decide whether filters apply to the queue, or whether the queue is random, or if users can even queue, and much more.
To ensure that every connection formed on the app is genuine we put the following constraints on how friendships start:
The network is semi-closed. You can’t just search for people and add them to your friend list. The only way to meet new people is to be in a session with them. Note that this is very different from the closed network we were in our shared music repository days: there you had no way to meet new people on the app at all, now sessions solve that problem.
Even inside a session we make sure that you have had some interaction with them before you try to connect.
Sessions don’t leave a trace. All the chat, the queue, the list of participants, and the listening history disappears as soon as the session ends. This is to ensure vulnerability in the session, and avoid choice overload in the future.
Observations
Our growth, retention, and word of mouth all grew significantly after implementing in sync group listening. Users started giving us shoutouts on social media, and a very strong sense of community started developing.
All the active users of our Discord community shifted to the app, and all interactions started happening on our own platform. Discord essentially became a bug reporting, and non-music activity related community space.
Hangout sessions kept running throughout the day. Some work sessions even lasted for as long as 10 hours! Every night some user would schedule a session to discover some new music, or just to get everyone to queue their own tracks and hangout.
The Indian Indie community became extremely strong now, they constantly started reporting that Lishash is the one social network where they feel a strong sense of belonging. Interestingly, most of the times they don’t listen to Indie Music, but music from all across the world.
On the contrary, people who joined from outside India would often report feeling left out, and not fitting in, and eventually churned.
A few people also were very mean to others, and criticised their music taste. Moreover, girls started getting unsolicited advances from a few users. All the bad behaviour that we associate with a social platform, started happening on Lishash as well. This was our biggest nightmare.
Solo listening dipped significantly. Majority of the times people would listen solo would be to check out the songs shared with them. Vibes took a backseat.
Conclusion
Synchronous communal listening is by far the most successful feature we have created, and is the primary reason behind our current community.
Hangout sessions gave our community a really chill and authentic vibe, and scheduled sessions played a major role in satisfying the discovery trigger, and retaining users.
The basic trait of our community is not the love for Indian Indie, but the fact that they love discovering new music, and are really empathetic and accepting towards each other.
Quality over quantity. Although received with a lot of criticism in the beginning, building additional barriers in our social network has really helped us maintain a high quality of connections between users.
Our bias against online social connections was really unfounded. Several of our users have become extremely close friends in real life as well. The formula is simple: get to know each other online, then meet offline. Neither is better than the other, both can coexist.
The in app features alone are not enough to make sure that users feel at home; some conscious outside checks on how people interact, and who they are also required.