✘ Has the time finally come for metered music experiences?
And: Social media creator revenue overtakes trad media; The nicest swamp on the internet; Curated guide to 80+ music startups
Metered streaming services, where you’d pay to listen to a limited number of songs per month, have not proven viable as a mainstream consumption model. It would certainly be challenging to compete with the likes of Spotify, Apple Music, and YouTube, but even before their emergence, ventures that attempted variations of metered models failed.
Why?
Today’s status quo of music streaming, with its licensing structures, monthly flat fees, and royalty models, stems from an era of widespread piracy. The premise of creating anything monetizable on the internet was that it would have to be able to ‘compete with free’. That means free as in gratis, but also free as in limitless and unconstrained.
All-you-can-eat music streaming services, priced at around $9.99 in most markets, fared well because their offering was simple. People didn’t have to think about what they wanted, how much they wanted to spend, etc. Just pay $10 a month — which was more than most people were spending at the time — and remove all friction, including the friction of downloading.
This also had a flattening effect: people who had spent more, suddenly had their spending capped at $9.99. What a bargain. This wasn’t a big issue in the context of widespread piracy, because the decrease in revenue from top spenders was compensated by the increase in the total amount of people spending money. However, in recent years, with the rate of streaming’s subscriber revenue growth declining and the number of people distributing music increasing, pains have emerged.
In my opinion, the industry has failed to innovate beyond this initial model. Its prize pony. Streaming should just have been a base layer on top of which to build additional models for interaction and monetisation. This hasn’t occurred in a meaningful way.
It’s not for a lack of trying. Especially in the early days of smartphones, some startups experimented with metered offline modes at price points that differed from the Spotify-all-you-can-eat model. In the UK, in 2013, an app called Bloom.fm let users stream its radio stations for free. When people discovered tracks they liked, they could ‘borrow them’ by saving them offline, so they could listen to them when they want in exchange for a monthly flat fee (1 GBP for 20 tracks per month and 5 GBP for 200 tracks).
Around the same time, I worked on an app called Fonoteka, which was an offshoot of an all-you-can-eat streaming service. The main service was centred around albums, rather than Spotify’s early playlist-centric nature. Instead of having an app that does everything, we wanted to get people to pick and mix models of payment around music. Fonoteka allowed people to take three albums with them each day for $1 (or 7 for $2), which we felt was an accessible-ish price point for more affluent people in Russia & CIS to get accustomed to making payments for music. From here, we could upsell them to other apps, including our subsequently launched all-in-one app.
Both apps experienced some success, but Bloom folded, and Fonoteka was retired due to the multi-app strategy becoming increasingly difficult to license, as Spotify was preparing to enter those markets, and major labels didn’t want to undermine their prize pony.
Later, when I joined classical music streaming service IDAGIO, I wanted to position the service as a complement to people’s music habits, rather than a replacement. People would choose to have multiple subscriptions: one for something like Spotify, and one for this specialist classical service, which enables different forms of navigation through the way it organises its metadata around compositions, composers, and performers, rather than the mere ‘featured artist - release’ model. People who cared enough about this music were willing to pay $10 extra per month, because the app offered new functionality. For our users, the payment was decoupled from “I get to access music for $10 per month” and instead justified as “I get to interact with music in this particular way for $10 per month”.
Unfortunately, Apple killed the possibility for this future to play out when it acquired another classical music streamer, rebranded it as Apple Classical, and merged it into its $10/month Apple Music subscription. Of course, Apple can afford to flatten music revenues in an effort to outcompete other companies and lock people into their ecosystem, because it makes its money elsewhere (most notably hardware sales & App Store commissions). Major labels should have used their leverage more effectively in this situation. I think the industry shot itself in the foot here.
But now, let’s focus on the obstacle of metered user experiences and how we might achieve a digital music landscape that includes such offerings.
Metered streaming and user experience design
Metered streaming needs to justify its friction:
How do you give people the feeling of a complete experience despite limitations?
How can you turn the need to make trade-offs a feature, rather than a burden?
How do you help people justify the cost of one more service?
Construct an experience people pay for that goes beyond simple music access.
Games do this well. Play the game for free or subscribe and get a limited number of extra power-ups or lootboxes each day or month. Another domain where this works really well is AI. ChatGPT claims 800 million weekly active users. That’s about 15% of all internet users worldwide. I’d assume many of them are used to running into their daily limits.
While ChatGPT is not that explicit or upfront about its limits, some other LLMs and AI startups are. Last week I spent a few days building my own language learning app with Lovable, which made me nervously stare down my remaining monthly credits.
(as a sidenote: by being upfront about it, by the time I hit the halfway mark, I knew it was time to wrap up and save any extras for the last 10-15% of remaining credits)
But there are examples closer to home, too. Take the generative music platforms — soon-to-be-licensed? — Suno and Udio. Both employ credit models, which give users some free credits each day. Users can also choose to extend the cap for a monthly subscription fee.
We could get into the ethical underpinnings of these platforms. We could also get into the way modern games may introduce young people to gambling-type behaviours. But we won’t. Instead, the takeaway here is the proliferation and normalisation of metered experiences in the cultural realm — a domain previously predicated on competing with gratis & abundant.
The creators formerly known as consumers
The recording industry is last century’s invention. I say this with respect. The piano, which I also respect, is older than the recording industry, and it’s still the model interface for music production. The recording industry created a new model of music consumption: nobody had to be in the room with you to play an instrument anymore, and with enough time, you could take the entire orchestra in your pocket with you to the bathroom as you go take a dump. Not even the wealthiest kings could do that (correct me if I’m wrong — but then do include an image that properly captures the vastness of that bathroom).
This is exceptional. Music was never like this.
And we’ve seen over the past decades — through sampling in hiphop, filesharing services, blogs, memes, IG stories and TikTok — that people often want to play a part. They want to remix, they want to adjust, they want to move familiar music into new contexts.
“AI music” may be flooding streaming services and competing with “real music”, which is an important problem. However, let’s not limit our focus: many people simply want to create and express themselves. They don’t care about the industry. They just want to hit a few buttons and have something novel to hear. If they like it, they might want to stick it in the places where they normally hear music, which is the recording industry’s ‘final form’: the interfaces of contemporary music streaming like Spotify.
Again, there are all kinds of legal and ethical debates to be had here, but what I want to emphasise is the basic human psychology of wanting to create and what happens when that possibility is made easier for everyone. These people are not ‘artists’, they’re just people who are expressing themselves through the same mediums as artists. Last century, they would just have been the recording industry’s consumers, and that would be their only role in the ecosystem. And they’re still consumers, but also creators, and by now, they’re getting used to metered experiences as they hit their daily limits.
You decide what’s next
It would probably be quite satisfying to now signpost towards where this is going. Believe me, I’m tempted. But actually, I don’t know. I see a gap. I think metered experiences have gained momentum, and now is a good time to experiment with such models in a way that can sit side-by-side with streaming’s status quo. That will make those metered experiences more niche to begin with (but remember, for much of the 00s, music streaming itself was quite niche), but I think they can have a broader appeal that goes beyond the usual “superfans” angle.
It’s easy to make software prototypes now.
So what’s next can be up to you.
You’re definitely not the only person reading this newsletter who has opinions and ideas about the future of music.
Build something.
Show us what the future can look like.
Go hit those token limits as prototype new metered experiences.
LINKS
🤳 Social media creators to overtake traditional media in ad revenue this year (Michael Savage)
“Content creators are expected to see their revenue through ads, brand deals and sponsorships increase by 20% this year, according to an assessment by WPP Media. It is expected to more than double to $376.6bn (£278.3bn) by 2030.”
✘ The trend was already here, so this was only a matter of time, but still an important milestone to consider as we venture even further in this direction.
🎧 80+ music startups: A curated guide (Emily White)
“Fans today expect a level of creative participation, especially generations of music fans who have grown up regularly creating and uploading content of their own. Co-creation and remix apps root the experience in something familiar and more accessible to more types of fans.”
✘ An excellent list by
. With lists like these, I always find it interesting to see what gets grouped together and how categories are defined, as that provides framing for current trends and developments. I won’t spoil it — click through to see for yourself.🐊 The nicest swamp on the internet (Adrienne LaFrance)
“Reddit is surging at a time when much of the rest of the social web has curdled. The mainstream platforms are overrun with a combination of bots, bigots, and bad AI, especially because platforms such as X and Facebook have declared that the substance of what people post is of no concern to them. Which is how we got to the point that Reddit, of all places, has developed a reputation as a force for good, or at least a force for reminding people of the promise of a decentralized open web.”
✘ The article presents an interesting case for human-led community moderation, rather than relying solely on the platform for moderation. It’s a nice reminder of what the internet can be if we choose to use it that way.
MUSIC
Thys, once known for hard-hitting drum ‘n bass dubbed ‘neurofunk’ as part of Noisia, recently released an EP called Le Thys through which he gives his own twist to French touch electro music. Super danceable and puts the fun in funky.
I am sure you've considered this, but rather than take an approach like metered which puts the limitation in the face of the user from the start, what about taking inspiration from the DLC model employed by video games? Your streaming sub gets you access to a vast library of music, but for something you like, extended experiences (bonus tracks, remixes, collabs, bts videos and so on) are available as DLC?
Splice uses the credits model too and there is not a producer that doesn’t use it… and there is a LOT to of producers these days