Market Research

Wouldn't it be cool if the purpose of business was to solve problems? That I could walk my neighborhood in Philadelphia, see the average person, understand their wants and needs, then build a sustainable for-profit business around that?

This is, of course, not how the world works. Or has ever worked. I'm hung up on it because at some point I believed the lie; the economics I learned in high school based on fundamental assuptions about human nature without psychological, sociological or historical merit. But I still believe in the idea of solving problems for others.

The biggest problems in my life are Instagram and Spotify. Instagram has given me the option to either constantly explose myself to a slot-machine of outrage content or socially isolate myself from all my friends. Instagram has provided my band the opportunity to help participate in creating the said outrage content but if we don't then no one will ever hear about anything we do.

Spotify has essentially monopolized how people listen to music. I either help Daniel Ek fundraise for his war crime automation startup [source] or I can decimate the number of people who will ever listen to the music I make.

A Small Survey

I'm not alone in my social media angst. I met up with some like-minded individuals and I encouraged us to do some "market research" about it to get a sense of how others felt. We came up with the following questions:

How do you find new music?

How do you feel about streaming services?

How do you feel about social media?

How do you meet new people?

Have you thought about self-hosting music?

I asked eight people from seven bands these questions. Here's what I learned.

Lots of people discover new music from Instagram stories

You can post an Instagram story and include a sound clip. A surprising majority of people I talked to said that hearing these clips in the background was a way they found new music.

Everyone loves streaming music, everyone hates Spotify

No one wants to return to the days of MP3s, CDs or vinyl. No one wants to be on Spotify, either, but they see it as a "necessary evil" for the obvious reason: that's where the listeners are.

Everyone dislikes social media for different reasons

Compared to the positive reception to streaming in general, people were universally negative when talking about social media. They see community as essential, social media as a terrible way to have said community, and no effective alternative to use instead. Yikes.

People Meet People IRL

The most common response to "how do you meet new people?" was at shows. I'd love to say something about "see? people still care about interactions IRL!" but this would be some massive survivorship bias since I'm pretty sure I met all these people at shows.

Unfortunately people in general are becoming more and more isolated, to the detriment of their own well-being. [source]

Self-Hosting as a solution: I'm tired, Boss.

For a lot of musicians, music is a full-time job that pays you in negative dollars. While the musicians I talked to are open to big ideas, there is little appetite for doing additional work when the benefit is in the abstract. If a solution is going to exist, it needs to have tangible benefits and take minimal effort.

Takeaways and Next Steps

Clearly I'm not alone in my frustrations with Instagram and Spotify. I want to make a sustainable alternative and key to that is going to be prioritizing concrete returns and ease-of-use.

The real problem underlying everything is "switching costs". People will take abuse so long as the cost to switch to an alternative is greater. I can envision an app that is anything and everything a musician could want but I'm only controlling one side of the equation. There is little I can do that would mitigate the loss of deleting an Instagram account or removing a band from Spotify.

These companies know this:

...FTC investigators cite internal Facebook communications in which engineers and executives plotted to increase switching costs in order to make it harder for dissatisfied users to switch to a better, rival service. [source]

Unfortunately, I think the real answer to this problem is government regulation and I'm not feeling optimistic about that path at the moment.

So we're all struggling with antisocial media platforms run by psychopaths. Maybe I can't solve the problem, but I can do the next best thing and do harm reduction. If I can get people to use Instagram less, then I'm having a positive impact. Maybe if I can get one less person on Spotify, I'm having a positive impact.

Okay, that's it for now!