Today we had another productive session of benchmarking and brainstorming!
One of our focuses today was on understanding the younger Audi consumer who we want to target with our music sharing application. We were surprised to learn that around 25% of Audi customers are in the 16-35 year-old age range, which is the largest percentage among luxury car brands. According to a recent NPR article ("Bringing Audi Back for a Younger Audience"), Audi has become the new "status car for young urban professionals." In the last several years, Audi has been targeting younger consumers through social networks like Twitter and Facebook and viral marketing campaigns featuring young celebrities.
While we were researching the other social music applications in the market, we realized a clear distinction between "active" and "passive" music listening, with apps tending to cater to either one or the other. Active listening is a form of listening where users are actively choosing every next song that will be played. This can happen through either creating your own playlists (in which case the work is front-loaded), or by continuously choosing the next song (as with Spotify). Passive listening, on the other hand, is best demonstrated by a service like Pandora, where users simply input a key (an artist, song, etc.) and are then only one click away from a stream of music, and the act of having to choosethe next song completely disappears.
Applications like Spotify and iTunes cater to active listeners, who know exactly what they want to hear and actively create their own playlists. Applications like Pandora and Songza cater to passive listeners, who select general filters based on genre and mood and then rely on the app to form playlists. We read an interesting study of Turntable.fm, a once-popular social music application that recently shut down ("Users Stop Using Turntable.fm"). Turntable.fm chairman Seth Goldstein speculated that the reason for the application's failure is that it required too much input and engagement from users, who would have also preferred the option to listen to a playlist more passively.
We decided that to avoid the same fate, we definitely want our application to give users both the options of active and passive listening, which we will do with two "modes" - one that automatically generates playlists based on genre/keywords, and one that allows the members of the car to manually select songs.
Based on our research today, we also discussed some of the features that we want to include in our app, as well as a general idea of the user flow. We are going to be making some paper prototypes and testing them tomorrow to refine our ideas for our liason meeting this Tuesday!
One of our focuses today was on understanding the younger Audi consumer who we want to target with our music sharing application. We were surprised to learn that around 25% of Audi customers are in the 16-35 year-old age range, which is the largest percentage among luxury car brands. According to a recent NPR article ("Bringing Audi Back for a Younger Audience"), Audi has become the new "status car for young urban professionals." In the last several years, Audi has been targeting younger consumers through social networks like Twitter and Facebook and viral marketing campaigns featuring young celebrities.
While we were researching the other social music applications in the market, we realized a clear distinction between "active" and "passive" music listening, with apps tending to cater to either one or the other. Active listening is a form of listening where users are actively choosing every next song that will be played. This can happen through either creating your own playlists (in which case the work is front-loaded), or by continuously choosing the next song (as with Spotify). Passive listening, on the other hand, is best demonstrated by a service like Pandora, where users simply input a key (an artist, song, etc.) and are then only one click away from a stream of music, and the act of having to choosethe next song completely disappears.
Applications like Spotify and iTunes cater to active listeners, who know exactly what they want to hear and actively create their own playlists. Applications like Pandora and Songza cater to passive listeners, who select general filters based on genre and mood and then rely on the app to form playlists. We read an interesting study of Turntable.fm, a once-popular social music application that recently shut down ("Users Stop Using Turntable.fm"). Turntable.fm chairman Seth Goldstein speculated that the reason for the application's failure is that it required too much input and engagement from users, who would have also preferred the option to listen to a playlist more passively.
We decided that to avoid the same fate, we definitely want our application to give users both the options of active and passive listening, which we will do with two "modes" - one that automatically generates playlists based on genre/keywords, and one that allows the members of the car to manually select songs.
Based on our research today, we also discussed some of the features that we want to include in our app, as well as a general idea of the user flow. We are going to be making some paper prototypes and testing them tomorrow to refine our ideas for our liason meeting this Tuesday!
No comments:
Post a Comment