Lishash & The Music Multiverse 🚀
Imagine the last time you were listening to your favourite music, and you got so immersed in it that your eyes closed automatically, you took a deep breath, and tingles started flowing down your spine! That feeling is called lishash. The feeling when you become one with your music. The feeling when you let all go.
We humans lead very difficult lives, and this experience of letting all go can be incredibly hard to come by. At Lishash, it’s our mission to create these moments on demand, at global scale, in the healthiest manner possible. Music and technology are the tools we use.
A glimpse into the future
It was New Year’s Eve: December 31, 2023. I and my cousins were celebrating together, and we wanted to play some party music that all of us would like. You too must have been in this position before, right? What do you do in this case?
We all have our own preferences and libraries; our own versions of party music. Unfortunately, there is no way to know what’s the common party music for all of us. What do we play then? Well, in our case, we opened Youtube, played a generic popular party song one of us suggested, which half of us did not even like by the way, and just kept selecting from the recommendations Youtube threw at us from there on.
Here’s another secret: this is exactly what we do in every single get together! The same tracks keep getting played over and over again… Is it the most delightful experience? Absolutely Not!
But what we can do? This is as good as it gets, doesn’t it?
As good as it gets?
There was a time when we used to carry a device called the iPod. It could store just about a 1000 songs, could not make any phone calls, and had no internet. But we still used to believe that this is as good as it gets. Then the iPhone arrived, and made it look like an archaic product. Before Airbnb, our primary options for stays while travelling used to be small hotel rooms. And we used to think this is as good as it gets. Before Spotify, we either had to pay $0.99 per song, or pirate the track. And we used to think that this is as good as it gets.
What’s the point? Every single time humans settle on this is as good as it gets, a disruptive new company comes along that fundamentally changes the way we live. These companies are often enabled by either massive platform shifts, or generational behaviour shifts, or both. Touch screen cellular internet communicators led to the iPhones, which in turn led to several other disruptive companies. This cycle repeats every few years in the tech industry.
Seismic Shifts
Currently, two massive platform shifts (AI + AR), and generational behaviour shifts (interactivity > passive consumption), are happening at the same time, and they are about to revolutionise the way we interact with music, and each other.
We’ll soon be able to converse with AI music assistants, like we are talking to a friend. “Not in the mood for romantic music right now, play something instrumental that I love, but is not jazz”: imagine being able to just say this and getting exactly the kind of music you were hoping for.
Can’t go to iconic concerts like Tomorrowland because they are too expensive? Too far? Some other reason? In the future you’ll be able to teleport yourself, and your friends, to events right from the comfort of your home. The experience will feel as if you are actually there, at a fraction of the cost. Let’s get one thing straight: IRL concerts can never be replaced, but many more people will be able to access them in the future due to extended reality. Purely virtual concerts will also be born.
If you love music, dating apps will not be the primary digital way to meet your romantic partners. You will not be under constant pressure to show off a happening lifestyle on social media. Just the act of sharing a song, and what you feel about it will expose you to several new friendships, and rekindle long lost connections. You won’t actively need to seek out new relationships: you will stumble upon them simply while scrolling through your music feeds. Serendipity will be ubiquitous, as it should always have been.
All of this will happen in one unified corner of the internet. There will be no need to switch between a gazillion apps. All of your friends, music, fans and artists will live in a single cohesive space. We call this space the music multiverse, and it’s made of 3 separate universes: the vibeverse, the noteverse, and the tribeverse. Let’s dig deeper…
The Vibeverse
AI Music Soulmate
Vibeverse is the universe in which we listen to music alone, in our own time, according to our own preferences. This universe is where we spend most of our music lives in. Its our comfort space; the background score to our lives.
Playlists are kings here. We create our own, pick from the ones put together by human curators, or listen to AI generated ones. Spotify’s Daylists, Discover Weekly, and Youtube’s “more like this” are some prime examples of the state of the art when it comes to AI recommendations in music.
Machines that speak our language
What happens though when we don’t know what to listen to?
Jeff, a sales representative at a consulting service in France, finds himself in this situation often. One night he comes back home from work extremely tired. To unwind, he wants to listen to some music, but has no clue what to play. What he does know for sure is that he is sick of listening to his library on shuffle everyday, and he does not want to listen to something completely new either. Confused, he opens his streaming app, and to make matters worse, on the home page itself he is bombarded with a dozen more recommendations. He already didn’t know what he wanted, and seeing so many options induces further choice overload in him. Daylists, and other AI generated playlists try to solve precisely this problem, but we have no control over them: if some day our daylist decides that we are in the mood for upbeat hip hop, when we are not, there is no way we can tell it “bro, please no hip hop today!”. Matters get even worse when we have a very very specific vibe that we want to play; for instance: “happy jazzy music that contains some electronic elements, but I have never heard before.” Our best bet, in these cases, is to search, but doing so just throws a bunch of generic jazz playlists at us. The way we talk to these apps is broken.
That’s about to change real soon though. The only tools music AIs could leverage till now were embeddings, and collaborative filtering. That changed when ChatGPT blew up, and LLMs became mainstream. Now we can just talk to AI in natural language via prompts, and it gets us most of the times. Oh, and by the way, this AI is smart, really really smart. This revolutionary platform shift has seeded several AI companions ranging from girlfriends to travel experts, and this is just the beginning!
At Lishash, we are building your musical companion. An AI you can talk to in plain English, just like you would to a friend, and it gets you every single time. If you don’t know what to listen to you can just say “Let All Go”, and it will automatically start playing a magic mix for you. You can guide it by saying stuff like “hmm this is a bit too calm for me, play something more energetic”, and it will do exactly that. For times you know exactly what your vibe is, you can just give a prompt, and even save it for easy access later. Watch the demo to see it all work like a charm!
The Noteverse
Serendipity Engine
Stacey is a final year design major at Stanford, and really really likes indie folk and metal music. It’s a lazy Sunday morning for her. She got done with all the college work yesterday, and just wants to chill today. While doing her dishes, she starts a speed metal radio on Spotify, and in a few minutes stumbles upon a track that she loves. Driven by an intense desire to share it with someone, she thinks about texting the song to her friends, but none of them like metal unfortunately. So she holds back. What else? Maybe she could put it up on her Instagram story? Umm, the same friends are going to see the story, and it will be a lot more effort, so what’s the point? What about Discord? She has been a lurker in a metal community there for some time. Yeah we could try that, she thinks. However, when she goes there, she sees at least 15 other links that have been dumped there since morning; no one is ever going to listen to them probably. Poor Stacey, just wanted someone to listen to her fresh find.
Every Stacey’s dream
Humans are social animals, and music is an inherently social activity; we don’t always want to consume it in an isolated context. Even more so with the advent of social media and feeds. TikTok & Instagram, for instance, are starting to become the primary source of music discovery for many people today. As we scroll reels for engaging content, we are constantly exposed to new music. Same applies to stories on Instagram & Snap. Even in almost all dating apps, showcasing the music you love has become a very powerful way to connect with potential partners who discover you in their feeds. This discovery via feeds/reels trend is so strong that almost all streaming services and e-commerce platforms are embracing this design for active discovery. It solves almost all the problems Stacey faced above: her content reaches people who’d actually like what she shared, without any link dumps, and information overload. Right?
Wrong. People on social media are consuming these reels for the engaging video content, music is primarily a background enhancer. To actually get eyeballs on her song, she’d have to first create something visually appealing, and that takes a lot of time and effort. Also, good luck putting a metal track in a feed full of pop and electronic catchy songs, made specifically for content like reels. Stacey’s desire is to share her song, and feel the companionship of someone else loving her music, as much as she did. She has no interest in becoming a full blown influencer on TikTok.
Now, imagine, if there was a universe where Stacey could share her song without ever having to create a video, could attach an optional text note to it, if she wanted to, and her content was automatically shown to people who love metal, and are in this universe specifically to discover music, not to consume video reels. We call this universe the Noteverse. A universe designed for serendipity. Without forcing Stacey to spend any time on making “pro” content, this universe exposes her to several new friendships that can stem purely out of music. Unlike the algorithmic echo chambers we live in today, noteverse allows us to control what’s being recommended, we can filter what we like, and block what we don’t. We can even create our own feeds. As consumers of these feeds, each song has a social context attached to it, giving it a story, a life. As note creators, we don’t have to worry about making our content engaging, we can let all go, and stay true to our desire of being heard by like minded humans. Even our profiles here are just about music, we look into each other’s souls, not faces. There is no pretence here. No showing off. It’s not just the most convenient way to discover & share music, but also the most wholesome!
The Tribeverse
Community & Shared Experiences
On April 26, 2020, rap star Travis Scott performed a groundbreaking concert that took place entirely in a video game called Fortnite! And it was not a one off incident. During the COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns across the world, several other artists hosted their own concerts on various Discord servers, new music centred communities were created, and listening to music with remote friends became the norm. Platforms like Stationhead sprung up. Fans could now stream their favourite artists together, in real time, and chat while doing so. We call this universe the Tribeverse. Unlike the Noteverse, here we are not limited to asynchronous interaction, rather, shared synchronous experiences define our reality.
Let’s be honest though, post COVID, most of the buzz around tribeverse fizzled out. Why? Several reasons. Even though incumbent streaming platforms like Spotify, Apple etc. allow us to stream together, there is no way to discover people with whom to listen to. They do not have a social graph, outside our friends, and again, our friends might not like the same music as we do. Social platforms like Telegram, and Discord tried to fill this gap with their communities, but had a terrible bot based music experience. Plus, on these apps, we have chats around so many different topics, and social groups, that music gets lost in the noise. And of course, the fidelity of online social music experiences comes nowhere near IRL right now, so both artists and fans shifted back to IRL mediums of communion as soon as the lockdowns lifted.
First signs of digital families
Is the tribeverse dead then? Not if we look at the trends. Apple and Meta are in an arms race to create high fidelity virtual experiences that feel just like real life. Companies like OpenAI have created video tools (Sora) that can spawn theoretically infinite, extremely realistic, video content, on demand. The newest generations of humans are making more and more friends online first, before they meet IRL. The cost of the hardware and AI, to create these virtual experiences, has started to come down, and will eventually become much cheaper than attending an IRL concert. Combine these with the first principle that digital socialisation is always going to be more convenient than IRL, especially in community settings, and the fact that humans tend to gravitate towards what’s more convenient strongly hints that the tribeverse is poised to make a massive comeback, once the extended reality experience is good and cheap enough of course.
Lishtedaars, a 5000+ member community of Indian music lovers, born entirely out of Lishash, is a fantastic case study of what the tribeverse future might look like, and the massive positive impact it can have on humans. Till date we have had in excess of 5000+ hangouts on Lishash, some of them had almost 50 people attend at once, and some lasted for 20 hours! Even now, every fortnight we host a potluck where we come together to discover new music released in the past 2 weeks. It’s become a ritual for us. All this time spent together online, has made our community members so comfortable with each other that a lot of us have even started dating. Many life long friendships have been formed. We have had dozens of IRL community meetups already, and a lot of us who live in the same city still hangout every weekend. We have become each other’s family! This is the power of the tribeverse, and the future interfaces are only going to make it more potent.
The Multiverse
It All Comes Together
You know what the iPhone’s real magic was? In his iconic presentation during the launch, Steve teased us saying: “An iPod. A phone. And an internet communicator. An iPod! A phone!… Are you getting it?! These are not 3 separate devices, this is one device. We are calling it… the iPhone.” Bundling these 3 experiences at the onset of the mobile platform shift ushered tremendous value for both us users, and Apple.
Similarly, the Vibeverse, the Noteverse, and the Tribeverse are valuable in their own right, making each of them better individually will create a lot of value for users, but unifying them all into one single universe will create delightful magic! Especially with the onset of the AI + AR platform shift. We are calling this unified universe the Music Multiverse.
Back to the cousins
Remember the new year party with my cousins? Imagine if we could just give a prompt like “play party music that all of us love, make sure that you prefer tracks that we have not heard in a long time, do not repeat the same tracks again”, and a banger we all like starts playing. We save this prompt as a vibe, and the next time we are all together, we just say “Lishash our cousin party mix”, and we are grooving already! Merging these universes into one experience allows us to make even the AI prompts social, and this is just the tip of the iceberg.
In the multiverse, even when we are listening to music alone, we can see which of our friends like the track that’s playing, and we are preferentially recommended songs that our friends have shared with us. We can start conversations right from the player interface, without ever having to switch contexts. Sharing notes is as easy as a single tap, so is meeting new people, discovering artists, and joining their fandoms. One of the biggest problems artists face today is that their fans are split across multiple platforms, each having their own bells and whistles, and managing their presence across all these spaces is in itself a full time task. The multiverse eliminates this problem. Everything from discovery, to consumption, to community all happen at the same place. Our friends, our fans, our tribes, our libraries, and our artists, all live together, cohesively. Everyone wins!
Just like the iPhone made everything before it look archaic, the multiverse will make us reflect on how cumbersome social music interfaces used to be, and this is not even a far fetched dream, most of these experiences are already possible on Lishash, your portal to the music multiverse, today!
We are currently in closed beta. If you’d like to experience the multiverse yourself, you can request access here, and we’ll send you an invite as more slots open up. If your friends are already on Lishash, you can simply ask them for an invite link, and skip the line! To get in touch with our team, you can write to us here.
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