Hacker News Reader

Comment by 21 | Hacker News Reader

So last year I was in a big brand clothing shop and I heard a cool song. I Shazamed it. At home searched it on YouTube.

To my shock, it was launched a few months ago and it barely had 5k views. The shock for me was how the hell a giant clothing company (H&M if I recall correctly) has such an underground song on.

So I started googleing around to find out how music in stores gets selected, and long story short, this is a multi-million dollar business and there are companies which create playlists according to your brand. These companies also scour the world for underground artists, because you want your store to have the best music before it's popular, so that customers perceive you as a trendsetter.

What is the success metric for these playlist companies? One of the task of store employees is to report how many customers they notice using Shazam in the store.

View on HN

This should have been an opportunity for Soundcloud actually, a lot of underground musical artists and an opportunity to connect via a large community platform to spread word.

Yes, but also a ton of unlicensed music (most of which came by way of remixes/DJ mixes), which they can't license it to soundtrack cos. Spotify owns one (major investor, created by an employee) called Soundtrack Your Brand. Pandora offers one as well.

Thats true actually and I've seen SoundCloud plagued by theses issues but there's always plenty talent that get accepted such as Lil Yachty or XXXtentacion or even Chance the Rapper who all started on SoundCloud, I think SoundCloud has the capability to filter out the easy hits to market and partner with

If it was obvious what the "easy hits" were, I'm sure many labels would be competing for them.

Not really, Chance the rapper, Lil Yachty etc had huge amounts of listens etc on SoundCloud which is why they became famous, they werent being signed by labels despite their heavy recognition. Chance the rapper went independent, like the thing is that labels only sort of pay attention to SoundCloud, the major medium is still YouTube, but we even see musicians there with followings and millions of views not being signed.

Not trying to sound ass-hurt but if theres a big platform of dedicated listeners and theres a lot of people with millions of listens, wouldnt those be easy hits?

very true

That's a good point. It looks like there is a bit of it going on: https://soundcloud.com/cosstores

Agreed. As long as you weed out the copyright infringement, this would work really well, considering that many artists that are popular today (chance the rapper comes to mind) started on Soundcloud.

I know a guy in a local band here in Portsmouth, England, and they had a song picked for a supermarket playlist in I think Brazil, ended up charting there and being flown out for a few shows. Another guy who was playing on the ferry to Spain for a living and had a hit in Korea through similar circumstances. This sort of thing can really make a career.

There was a company from the first dot-com boom called Big Champagne the crawled Napster and other file-sharing networks to discover what new songs were popular. They're now owned by Ticketmaster.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BigChampagne

My team wrote a web crawler once to answer the same question about MP3 blogs. Fun era.

Blast from the past that. I feel like I heard about them in The Industry Standard or Wired at the time.

Yeah a friend of mine is a music producer and he signed a deal to have one of his songs at a designer clothes store when he had maybe 500 sales total. He has no idea how they found him but they paid him a few grand.

It's probably an easy way for them to get great music for cheap. There are underground artists making far better music than your generic EDM out there.

Well a lot of major EDM artists use ghost/shadow artists. Because they have to pump out a podcast every week with some of the music original they just have ghost minions do it. It's the brand they establish that sells it.

Friend of a friend does (did?) this for, iirc, Topshop etc. Apparently she's bleeding edge cool/hipster - literally tasked with listening to 'everything', figuring what's cool, what's up and coming, who is going be 'cool' next and sticking it on a playlist. I remember sitting in a pub chatting about what a great job it must be. That said, this was probably 8 years ago, so definitely in the Shazam era, but I assume before anyone was using it for any reference point.

On a related note, Red Bull funds a lot of programs for up-and-coming artists[0] as well as subsidizes as a concert series[1]. It's good for branding.

[0] http://www.redbullmusicacademy.com

[1] https://www.redbullsoundselect.com/events

Red Bull sponsors an amazing variety of cultural events as well as athletes including in some exceedingly niche sports as well as very very expensive endeavors (running effectively two formula 1 teams, fleet of old expensive to maintain aircraft, etc).

Their marketing budget must be massive. My understanding is the unit cost of any kind of drink is very low and its entirely a market-dominance driven game so the spend makes a lot of sense especially when they command a premium price.

Some of their downhill mountain biking races through narrow village streets are amazing. Honestly, all of their mountain biking videos are incredible.

One of my favorites: https://youtu.be/mFuSjk7jv_M

This is why I love mountain biking. Flying through the woods (or this setting) is just exhilarating.

You’re not thinking about the problems of life, you’re thinking and reacting to what’s a tenth of a second in front of you. What’s beyond that turn? You’ll find out soon enough.

Yeah, no room for extraneous worries when you are trying to navigate constantly shifting landscapes of obstacles and advantages.

Another one because why not.

https://youtu.be/K_7k3fnxPq0

Danny MacAskill is incredible and when you watch the behind the scenes videos you really get a sense of how patient and supportive Red Bull are of their athletes.

So good!

He's incredible. All of their athletes are. I don't know if mere mortals understand just how good the best in the world are at their sport. It's always inspiring to see creativity in unexpected places.

Their Github (!) has a collection of event sourcing libraries they've built on top of Scala/Akka. Their budget is big enough for a soft drink company to justify a sizable open source program.

So much of product, especially beverage marketing is positioning yourself as being a part of a certain community, it's very possible their open source contributions are simply an extension of that.

There is a reason why Cocacola spends an obscene amount of money marketing sugared water. Almost every country I have been, I have seen coca cola bill board ads. They paint your storefront free if it's coca cola branded. Give you a free coca cola branded fridge if you only sell their drinks. They really do go out of their way to make a brand impression.

I'm impressed

They sponsor a lot of collegiate hackathons. College students and high-income developers working long hours are natural target customers.

Red Bull is a media company that sells an energy drink. Not an energy drink company.

Incidentally - or not, as the case may be - Red Bull's Danish offices are right on top of Google's in central Copenhagen. So much so that once I mistook one backdoor for the other.

The Google logo on the frontdoor, by the way, says Göögle.

We do this at amazinginstore.com with fresh new unsigned tunes uploaded to amazingtunes.com while promoted at amazingradio.com

The in-store music is how we make some money and pay artists.

I have once heard a beautiful song in a local swimming pool. I've shazamed and googled it just to find the only place it was available from being Audiosparx - a site I've never heard about before that time, seeming kind of an "audio clip-art" store, titled as "commercial music for video, TV, film and media".

> One of the task of store employees is to report how many customers they notice using Shazam in the store

Fascinating. Do you remember your source?

It was an article about a UK playlist selection company which had 6 millions yearly revenue doing this. Unfortunately I can't hit the right keywords now to find it again.

What a delightful discovery, this playlist selection vertical.

Going down that rabbit hole, I discovered some gems:

[1] Restaurant music emerges from the background - http://www.crainsnewyork.com/article/20170807/ENTERTAINMENT/...

[2] Who Picks The Music You Hear At The Mall? - https://www.npr.org/sections/therecord/2012/11/28/165947927/...

[3] Gap In-Store Playlists 1992 to 2006: The Monthly Playlists at Gap - https://gapinstoreplaylists.blogspot.com

Well, shazam could sell that info to the stores

heck, they could even tell by sniffing wifi traffic

I wonder how many people actually end up connecting to the store wifi.

Or you install a DAS in the store and monitor the traffic of phones connected to that.

I think they could just get your MAC address if you have your WiFi turned on, without you actually connecting.

iOS doesn’t allow this any longer.

location + time + song = exact match

Of course, you'd have to trust Shazam to provide accurate data.

On iOS, Shazam is usually used through Siri (it's beyond me why anyone would download the standalone app).

I wonder if the connection is made straight from the iPhone to shazam, or Apple actually proxies this.

You are correct. I used to work for a company in the Netherlands that does this for a couple of big brands, often for every store worldwide. I was in technical support for the music players.

They had two guys, who were also DJ's in some local clubs, work in an insane spreadsheet to decide the music for many different brands. Whenever I'd hear a cool new track I'd tell them. That way a track I found ended up playing in a bunch of stores worldwide, pretty cool.

I'm also surprised by how Shazam had such an unknown song in its database...

Shazam is just another platform to service like iTunes or Spotify.

If it's in the licensed database of e.g. Apple Music or Spotify, then Shazam can just as easily scoop it up and classify it.

OP mentioned that they use the number of customers using Shazam as a metric. Maybe once they decide to use a song in their playlist they (somehow) make sure that it's in the database.

The great extent of their database can be annoying at times. I turned on the TV during the Winter Olympics once, and saw that one of the ice skating events where the competitors skate to music was on--probably Ice Dancing.

The performance being shown was using some fairly well known piece of classical music that I did recognize, so I tried Shazam [1] and it identified it, but not in the way I wanted. Instead of telling me the name of the piece and the composer, it told me who the skaters were, that it was from their Winter Olympics routine, and what round of the competition it was from.

[1] ...I'm not actually sure if it was Shazam. Might have been SoundHound.

Big companies fund bands or give them exposure because if the song becomes popular its good for relevancy.

Check out Levi's as a good example in the 90's.

I know of one or two alcohol companies that fund small bands road tours in different countries as well.

I was recently out and heard a country song I’m sure is one of the most inane songs I’ve ever heard in my life. I Shazam’d this atrocity to discover it was a two year old song by American Idol contestant, Kellie Pickler. How do I feel now, better or worse?

Do they really need to rely in manual reporting? I'm pretty sure Shazam has no trouble at all collecting these statistics, and I'd be really surprised if they didn't monetize them.

Wonder if Shazam asks for location? If yes I don’t see why they need it as a user. If no then this metric might be difficult.

"What was the name of that song I shazamed while visiting Amsterdam? Ah, here it is."

Location is massively important in searching for a memory. I will forget the dates I was in Europe, but I will not forget that I was there.

Is that a use case Shazam supports? I would think if the song was good you would add it to your library.

To answer your original question: I checked the latest version of Shazam, and it does not request location services at all. (And I can't find a setting that might enable it later, either.)

I believe cmelbye was simply responding to your "if yes" with a justification for why it's useful. Even if I added the song to my library, what if I don't remember the name or the artist? Will I find it easily amongst the 5000 other songs I've got in there? And maybe I didn't like the song, but I'm reminded of it for some reason and it's really bugging me that I can't remember enough details to find it again. I guess I could listen to every single from every unfamiliar artist I see in my Shazaam history...

Indexing our life events by location and time, paired with a smoother search interface, would dramatically improve the memory augmentation aspects of our personal devices. There are, of course, tremendous privacy risks in accumulating this data (which is why the design tradeoffs / permission system around location services exists in the first place).

No need to wonder. On my iPhone, Shazam has access to location while in use. It’s my impression that most people auto-click “yes” when prompted for this.

Yet, do many people use the standalone Shazam app, rather than the Siri integration?

Shazam would need your location to accurately report these.

Or they can install ultrasound beacons in the stores. They already have access to the microphone for obvious reasons.

Not even ultrasound, just correlate what everybody hears at the same time?

They might just need one data point, if the playlist curator tells them the exact moment at which the song started.

My Shazam app (iPhone) has access to location while in use. I assume most people just click “yes” when asked about this.

Mine is on never and the other option is “while using the app”. I have no recollection of choosing the setting either.

They know which song is played and how many seconds you are into the song at what time. The only info they need is the playlist of the store to find out your location.

In the UK a lot of chain stores have a "radio" station meaning that they all play the same song at the same time.

I would think its more related to royalties.. 'up and coming artists' are also cheap artists. I would am interested in subscribing to such a service for my properties.

I would imagine streaming a song in a store is much cheaper than say putting in a TV ad. But I'm no expert.

FWIW, it was this song. Sounded amazing on the store speakers. Even today, it barely has 100k views - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2EdGEqbwSQ0

I wonder what if there really is a significant difference between streaming a song in a store vis-a-vis placing it in a TV ad.

That said, of the two playlist selection companies that I have only just read about, the charge for streaming in-store is between $34 to $199 per location per month.

[1] Soundtrack Your Brand, a ‘Spotify for B2B’ nabs $22M for expansion - https://techcrunch.com/2017/02/17/soundtrack-your-brand-a-sp...

[2] Restaurant music emerges from the background - http://www.crainsnewyork.com/article/20170807/ENTERTAINMENT/...

https://pitchbook.com/profiles/company/109173-88

In the early 2000s, I used to work a relatively large music company (Album Network, later acquired by Clear Channel) whole sole purpose in life was to make music charts of what's popular, and publish a monthly magazine/charts of the hottest artists.

Point being is that music charts are BIG business, and remain so to this day. I'm not at all surprised to hear that this has spread to brick and mortar stores. IIRC Starbucks has an in-house music curation department.

Shortly before MP3 players made the whole concept silky, Starbucks had some sort of pilot going with HP to let people burn custom discs at some sort of kiosk in Starbucks stores. So they’ve long been playing around with music-related stuff.

> What is the success metric for these playlist companies?

Well, if the goal is to pick trending music before it trends, I imagine it's largely a matter of letting time pass to see what % of music popped with the desired demographic segment.

I've conducted diligence on one of these businesses before (it was acquired a PE firm). The overall market is somewhat limited, but you're right there is a whole industry out there for this type of stuff.

Heh. I’d love to find a site that has the Walmart playlist. I do wonder if these are actually kept secret or if stores do publish them.

I am sure the 'underground songs' also cost a small fraction of the price of licensing mainstream songs.

Does it? I know for a fact that artists in most of Europe get fixed fees for different types of public performance (played on the radio/played at a company function/etc.). Only "royalty free" titles manage their own contracts. No TV station actually talks to some band's manager to license their song when it plays on the car radio in the background.

An ASCAP license for a general business is around $3.33 * occupancy per year. There isn't that much money to save by getting out of licensing fees.

I guess this is a good thing for artists...an additional outlet besides the big record labels

OK well every time I'm in Walgreens all I hear is Phil Collins.

Am I the only one curious as to what the cool song was?

Posted it in another comment - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2EdGEqbwSQ0

welcome to basic audio design practice in place for commercials and marketing for about 30 years. the approach hasn’t changed only it gets easier.

Which song was it?

So much for the disco soundtrack in my store :-(

> What is the success metric for these playlist companies?

I wonder this about the entire branding industry.

Just didn't think someone put it in the playlist?

That was a very enjoyable circular anecdote.

"What is the success metric for these playlist companies?"

Extremely difficult to determine.

And the 'taste-makers' in music are very hard to find, though they should easily have access to the latest/hippest tracks.

Design is one of the hardest things for a reason.

If fashion truly were a commodity H&M etc. simply would not exist.

That's why I could never find that song played in the SuperDry store!?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com