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“Curating music experiences is something that Rhapsody has done since its inception. As Listen.com, our original charter was to curate the best legal MP3s on the web. Over the years, through features such as hand-programmed radio, mood and activity playlists, genre explorations, artist interviews, original audio and everything in between, we’ve explored the many ways a digital music service can integrate curation into our products.
It’s About Creating Business Value
So okay, we know that curation solves a customer problem. But what about the business impact? One of the most important metrics for a subscription service is churn — the rate at which customers quit. Churn is important because acquiring new customers costs a fair amount of money; either in direct marketing, giving away expensive content or advertising. The sooner the customer churns, the more a service loses in sunk costs, plus you need to spend that money again to replace them.
Churn is a critical indicator of the health of any subscription business. We have teams that do nothing but think about churn. I’m sure some of my colleagues even dream about it. So what’s the number one indicator of churn? Inactivity — not using the product. It seems obvious, but if a customer uses the product more, they are less likely to leave. In fact, we’ve found if we can get a customer to play more than 50 tracks a month, the churn rate drops in the double digits.
So we have worked really hard to keep our customers as active as possible and have utilized curation as a driver, so that every time our members fire up the service, they’re going to get something new to play.
We’ve rolled out our curation products where the customers are listening. Our Featured section is front and center in our mobile apps. Our curated playlists, stations, and posts are prominent in our browse experience. And our members tell us how much they dig them.
It Is About Variety
One thing we’ve learned observing usage patterns over the years is that music tastes are like snowflakes: no two people’s are the same. While it might seem to you like everyone in the world follows Pitchfork or watches American Idol, our customers listen across the gamut of music – new and old, mainstream and underground, even across cultural boundaries.
And our best customers listen to more than 200 subgenres a year, which is why we employ dozens of experts in hundreds of genres – great curation means speaking to a wide variety of tastes and interests, which is something we think we’re really good at. Just ask our huge base of regional Mexican fans, or all our subscribers who can’t get enough Bakersfield Country.”
Via Hypebot
