Consider it a partial spec for a web page. The maths / logic are in the formulae and should be understandable… please check them at the same time!
The UI is of course rubbish, so someone with a gift for UI design and graphics could come up with a simple page to capture the number of plays / day and then allow the user to select their listening pattern.
A simple display of the results would follow.
All the complex calcs could be hidden behind a “show how you worked that out” button, which shows a statement (a bit like the spreadsheet)
In the statement it might be nice to have 3 histograms for the 1-9 play levels, showing:
s2o price
user plays
cost at each level in credits and local currency
Needs to be multi currency - detect user region and only display in their currency
Work on the wording of the messaging / conclusion:
emphasise affordability for most, especially explorers
mention other partner services like bandcamp as a companion tool for niche listeners
highlight better value over time from owned plays and bulk purchase of credits
explain that this is user centric and that what you pay is split on a what you play basis
avoid making comparisons with other services until we have a credibly large catalogue
SELL: sign up link, credit top up link
mention community membership and have a join now link on the page
Any page designers / builders out there? @zetto.plus do you have someone who might be interested?
In the meantime, anyone in a Twitter thread on how much will this cost me would be able to use the calc to answer the question with a consistent estimate… or provide examples.
@llk and I are loving the calculator. However, we have discovered an issue…
It doesn’t account for the fact that niche listeners are more likely to be owners of tracks, therefore, a significant part of their listening a day/month will be entirely for free, as they’ve previously paid.
In fact, the calculator doesn’t account for any of the listeners listening to their playlists/favourite tracks that they’ve already paid for. Or that the longer you’re a member of Resonate, the more likely you are to have fully paid for tracks in your collection that you’re listening to.
This is important for Resonate and stream2own, as this “paid in full” aspect of the listening catalogue becoming your listening library, makes us unique and overtime is a huge bonus for our listeners.
Is there a way to add in this variable to the calculator? Otherwise, I think we can only use the calculator for explorers and not to calculate niche listener habits.
Hiya! In fact there is a crude factor in there to account for ‘owned’ tracks. It’s the ratio between plays on the day and number of tracks likely to be owned after just one day’s play. Actually a small number, but this compounds as you listen for more days, the more you are with us the more likely you are to buy… a but like a compound interest formula. For explorers it’s set low, for niche it is set high. If you tweak this factor you can increase the ‘owned plays’ discount. Niche listeners who know what they want and want to play it a lot might be better to spend on Bandcamp as a listening strategy.
Btw don’t thank me, thank @Sam_Martyn for starting this off!
Yeah the idea being that if niche listeners feel like spending on Resonate (either by using S2O or straight up buying on the platform) after a while the money they spend of the platform proportionally dramatically decreases which is good for them because it means they can spend the amount they save on new discoveries. (there’s a reason why we see the “legacy catalogue” is all dominant these days > people love to listen what they already know)
PS: How strongly do we feel about ACTUALLY recommending that behavior in our own marketting. Personally I think it would only make us look better for it (“look ! we’re not scared of alternatives, they’re not competition, in fact we embrace them.”)
Something like a hidden nod, “if after a few listens, you’re still uncertain you want to use more of your credits on a single track, there are often other alternatives where you can listen to it until you’re sure. Meanwhile, you’ve already helped them get much more out of those few listens than if you’d been doing the exact same thing on a corporate streaming platform.”
Also as pointed above, I don’t think there’s any advantage (once we have download that is) to “buy” something you know you want on Bandcamp vs Resonate (either way you’re going to spend 10€ and play it a lot), the only advantage Bandcamp has over us for niche users is if they want to listen to their niche artist a lot before actually buying it, and we have user playlists over them.
I know, I use it, but it’s not native, and it’s not a terrific user experience and also it feels so weirdly like they’re… Cheating somehow? I mean is it really legal? My guess would be not but I can’t tell. But either way it’s not in anyway a streamlined playlist experience the way Resonate can offer.
The point is that there is an API and Bandcamp may be up for collaboration?
They have a very mature download capability - it would take us a long time to reproduce that - and they have a massive user base. They don’t do playlisting and they don’t do community very well. We do.
We can absolutely talk to them but they’ll never work with us, they have absolutely 0 reason to do it, it would only make their business worse, OR it would actually mean that we become their official playlist service and 1/ Bandcamp not having playlists isn’t a bug it’s a feature 2/ If they decided to implement a fully featured playlist system they’d do it themselves within their closed ecosystem 3/ S2O would have to be included in the offer and that effectively means we’d be taking money away from bandcamp and funelling it into our platform instead which they’ll NEVER agree to.
So what are the options left?
The one I see is we could ask them to join the verifiable credentials initiative and issue verifiable credentials when people purchase on Bandcamp so that they can import their bandcamp catalogue right into Resonate and focus on discovery instead of buying again things they’ve already paid for.
Will Bandcamp agree to this?
My guess is no : because it means a lot of work / funds on their side for something that will have absolutely 0 direct benefit to them, they’d effectively be spending money to help us. I like Bandcamp but I don’t think they’re that benevolent, until proven otherwise they’ve spent most of their work creating a closed ecosystem.
Even worse, if we’re to assume Verifiable Credential ensures interoperability of services, it means when someone buys on S2O, they should be allowed to download on Bandcamp right (since it’s a feature they have and we don’t and that’s part of why we want to talk to them), so Bandcamp would be providing a service for us for… Free?
Or are we saying we want to add a Bandcamp cut in Resonate’s finances to ensure a partnership?
I’d love to be proven wrong sincerely, so I’m all ok for trying, but I have a really hard time figuring why they’d do anything to help us out of the kindness of their heart.
As much as I love the idea that my Bandcamp purchases would be interoperable with Resonate, and also, no harm in trying, I’m sceptical and agree with everything you’ve said here.
I mentionned it elsewhere but hours is the metric absolutely, I’ve revised the stats in our S2O updated document (we’re writing it right now actually) based on the average song on spotify being 3min17 and 10€ of credits it gives us something like 4 hours a day for 30 days.
First, don’t ever get your coat we need you!
Second my take is not a lack of desire (I WANT people to be able to import their Bandcamp catalogue on Resonate, I WANT Resonate users to be able to download their tracks on Bandcamp) more a sad prediction : Bandcamp will never help us. We have their API (like everybody does) and that’s I think the extent of the help we can expect from them and that is all.
I’d love to be proven wrong.
Sorry and just to add I’ve read this link
and unless since then we had more infos about a potential collaboration this definitely sounds like wishful thinking to me because it doesn’t answer the only question that matters:
Since the bigger we’d hypothetically grow, the more money we’d take out of Bandcamp’s business and add into our own, what’s the financial incentive on their part to help us that doesn’t make us a direct threat to their business? How do they get a cut of the money used to buy on our S2O platform when the people come to theirs to download? Surely it’s not expected that they’d do it for free?
That’s all I want to know because… That’s probably all Bandcamp would want to know.
So, 3:17 is near enough 3.3 mins, which is near enough 18 tracks per hour.
4 hours per day, based upon the % and weightings in the number of plays spreadsheet, at 18 tracks per hour, comes out ~€20.
I could’ve completely mucked up my quick version of the spreadsheet calculator but there does seem to be a discrepancy between the calculations you mention for the revised s2o document and the spreadsheet @Nick_M posted above.
Again, I might be wrong, but that’d be my sanity checking… something not 100% aligned somewhere?
Yes, which as we’ve seemed to gather with @melis_tailored (and I’ll look for more sturdy data tomorrow) seems to be on the very high end of active users, like… Not that many people listen to 4 hours a day of music.
Edit: and if we consider a “casual user” who listens to maybe 2h a day max but listens to his favorite songs a bit more then with “both” we also reach 11€ so it’s still close to the average streaming monthly sub.
That was also as ‘both’ but this is still a remaining ? then.
So… ‘buy 5 credits for €17 = typically 16 hours of listening’ means 5 / 16 = 0.3125 credits per hour.
Sticking to explorer mode for now…
18 tracks per hour for 4 hours = 72 tracks
72 tracks in the s2o calculator use 0.263 credits which is less than 1 hour of listening if 0.3125 credits per hour.
What is the ‘buy 5 credits for €17 = typically 16 hours of listening’ based upon? Maybe this is the least important bit though and the rest of the math looks good?
With an average song at 3minutes (sorta) that’s minimum 7500 minutes, so that’s about 125 HOURS of discovery? like that’s a huge difference? I fail to see how we could go from that to 17hours.
17 hours is on an average 340 songs. Discovery for 340 songs is 340x0.002 so 0.68 credits?
Spending 5 credits for 17 hours could either mean :
We expect people to only listen to 1/7th of their songs (but it’d take songs to be 7 minutes long for people to have to go past 45 sec to trigger the credit and then stop 15 sec after)
We expect people to listen to all their songs 3 times (then around 4.1 credits become 340 songs x 3 times listened x (.002+.004+.008=.012) so maybe that’s the idea here?)
