Magnatune blog

Popular genres, v2

I thought this was a very good point made in the comments of my previous post:

It strikes me that one issue that may skew these numbers is the relative breadth of categories. "Classical" is a very big tent, to the point that someone looking for Gregorian Chant and someone looking for post-Romantic French music will be looking in the same place. There is a much greater chronological and stylistic range in what you call classical music and what you call "hard rock," "electro rock," "electronica," etc.

His point is that the "bucketing" in the chart is really skewing the results. So I redid the charts by combining sub-genres in a way that seemed appropriate.

Here's what I did:
- I combined "ambient" and "new age"
- I combined "Alt Rock" "Hard Rock", "Electro Rock" and "Hip Hop"
- I combined "World" with "Jazz" (I know, that's debatable).
- I left Electronica as its own genre

The chart does come out differently after doing this.

here are some things I note from this new chart:

- each genre (except new age/ambient) has a similar number of albums at Magnatune

- demand for classical is greater than the catalog size, and he opposite is true for new age. However new age/ambient is still the #2 more popular genre.

- jazz/world and electronica have appropriately sized catalogs for their demand, though we have more rock than demand.

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VISITORS vs MEMBERS

DEMAND in the chart above is based on what visitors to the Magnatune home page click on.

But, I wondered, what do paying members actually download?

Here is the chart:

Here is what I take away from this:

- New Age is very popular with people who choose to become members, followed by Classical.

- the catalog size fairly closely matches up what is desired by members.

- there is more demand for new age and classical than there is catalog

- and there are more rock albums than there is demand for them.

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Conclusion: both charts are important. The first chart shows how our catalog size matches up with what new visitors to magnatune are looking for. Those are potential members. The second chart shows what paying members actually download, and keeping them happy keeps them as members.

Will this knowledge change what kind of music musicians I sign up for Magnatune?

No, not really: I get about 100 artists submitting every week, and I simply sign anything that comes to me that I think is fantastic.

However, it's possible that these sorts of numbers will motivate more musicians in certain genres to submit more music, which would then cause me to sign more of that genre.

-john

Magnatune Mobile

A mobile phone friendly version of the Magnatune web site is now available.

It is known to work with iPhone, Android and Blackberry. This is the only way for users of Android and Blackberry phones to access the member-only features. iPhone users can our our iPhone app, or use this new Magnatune mobile site.

This mobile interface might work on other phones models (Symbian? Windows Mobile 7?). If it does work for you on another phone model, please leave a comment.

To get to Mobile Magnatune, you can either go directly to http://magnatune.com/mobile/ or visit the Magnatune home page, which will auto-detect your iPhone/iPad/Android/Blackberry phone and place a message at the top, inviting you to instead visit the mobile site. Here is what the Magnatune home page now looks like from an iPhone:

The reason I have it display a message at the top of the page, is so that you have the option of using the graphics-heavy normal web site if you want to.

On the home page of Magnatune Mobile, you can choose to listen to music by genre, artist or album. If you're a member you can also choose to log in and get a advertising-free version of all the same offerings:

In addition, all our podcasts are also available here, seen here on the Android:

When you play an album, the artwork, artist and album name are displayed above a controller (shown here on a blackberry):

and here is what it looks like on an iPhone:

One slight oddity: each platform seems have a different concept of when to "stop the music". Here is what I've found:

• iPhone/iPad: music keeps playing when you leave a page. However, when you go to play another piece of music the controller shows a "pause" button on the current page (instead of a "play" button) and when you click the "pause" button, the existing music (currently playing in the background) stops and the foreground music starts. This seems like the best implementation of any mobile phone so far.
• Android: In my tests, only Android versions 2.3.1 and greater work correctly. Earlier versions of Android appear to lack support for web-based audio. Also, music keeps playing when you leave the page, and if you play another album, both play at the same time (background and foreground music). Therefore, on Android, you should hit "pause" on an album if you want it to stop playing, it will not auto-stop (until you exit the browswer).
• Blackberry: I wasn't able to play another album or pause the current one once I'd started playing one. This was on my Blackberry 9800. This looks like a bug, and may already be fixed on newer models.

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Update on March 4th

I've been able to get the Magnatune Mobile web site to work now with older Android versions, specifically v1.6, v2.1, v2.2, v2.3.1, v2.3.3.

There now a message at the bottom of the screen which says "no sound? click here", which then is a direct URL to the mp3 file itself. This workaround seems to work on most everything.

Here is what it now looks like on Android 1.6:

after you "click here" a new window will open with a dedicated audio player which looks like this.

When you close the audio player, you're taken back to the previous page, so this alternative method works out quite well.

Note that these screens and this additional step are only required on older mobile phones. Current iPhone and Android phones support the "audio player on a page" and look perfect.

Popular genres on home page

Just for fun, I crunched some numbers to see what genre people tend to click on when they come to the home page.

Here are the results:

Classical is by far the most popular one (1 in 3 home page visitors click on it), though electronica is very popular too (1 in 7 visitors click on it).

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Our Catalog by Genre

Joerg asked: how does this correlate to the number of albums in each genre? and so I made this chart comparing the number of albums per genre vs the actual demand for those genres, as evaluated by what people click on the home page.

and here are the actual numbers:

You can see that the numbers "demand vs actual" roughly coincide, though with some variability:

1) For classical, jazz and hip-hop there's a greater demand for those genres than there is catalog

2) There are more albums than demand for alt rock, new age, hard rock, electro rock and world.

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And what about licenses by genre?

At Magnatune, we have two business: selling all-you-can-eat memberships, and also licensing music to businesses. I ran the same analysis for our licensing, and found that new age is the most popular genre to license, and that all the other genres are about equal in licensing (we just started offering hip hip last year, which is probably why it's so small).

Here's a chart:

and here's the actual number of licenses we sold per genre:

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I thought this was a very good point made in the comments:

It strikes me that one issue that may skew these numbers is the relative breadth of categories. "Classical" is a very big tent, to the point that someone looking for Gregorian Chant and someone looking for post-Romantic French music will be looking in the same place. There is a much greater chronological and stylistic range in what you call classical music and what you call "hard rock," "electro rock," "electronica," etc.

His point (as I take it) is that the "bucketing" in the chart is really skewing the results. So I redid the charts by combining genres to combining sub-genres in a way that seemed fair.

Here's what I did:
- I combined "ambient" and "new age"
- I combined "Alt Rock" "Hard Rock" and "Electro Rock"
- I combined "World" with "Jazz" (I know, that's debatable).
- I left Electronica alone

The chart does come out differently after doing this:

here are some things I note from this new chart:

- all the genre (except new age/ambient) have a similar number of albums

- demand for classical is greater than the catalog size, and he opposite is true for new age. However new age/ambient is still the #2 more popular genre.

- jazz/world and electronica have appropriately sized catalogs for their demand, though we have more rock than demand.

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A followup blog posting is available with more charts.

Podcast improvements

The 45 podcasts that are produced weekly are now featured on the home page. You can play them directly from the pulldown list on the bottom of the home page:

Our podcasts are:

1 hour shows of music in a very specific genre

any silence at the beginning or end of each song trimmed off

the volume between songs is equalized

each new song fades in as the old one fades out

songs are chosen with a preference toward what's new and best at Magnatune, but older and more obscure material is rotated in as well

In general, I find listening to podcasts to be the most enjoyable way to discover new music at Magnatune, it seems much more like listening to a friend's mix tape. When guests come over for dinner, I put a podcast on.

FYI download members get to enjoy 2 hour long podcasts, and they have no ads in them.

In addition, I've improved the podcast flash player so that you can jump within the hourlong podcast, and a timer shows you exactly where you are in it, so that if you hear a song you like, you can see from the table-of-contents what it is, and jump right to that album.

I've marked the new timer feature, and the ability to jump with arrows in this graphic:

Short adverts

On the free listening site (http://magnatune.com) we've started putting in short advertisements mixed into the songs themselves. Over the next two weeks, all the free listening will have these little adverts (ie: "you're listening to Magnatune") in them.

The idea is to motivate you to get a Magnatune membership, and thus enjoy commercial-free listening as well as full download access to all our music.

The reason for this change?

• Each day, about 20,000 people listen to music for free on Magnatune.
  
• Each day, about 6 people sign up for a membership.

That means that 99.95% of daily listeners at Magnatune are listening for free.

Magnatune is a small business (there's four of us working here) and so every daily new membership makes a huge difference.

Heck, I'd be happy if free listeners accounted for 99.5% of daily visitors (that'd be a 10x improvement!)

And of course, my personal mission is to find a way to financially support interesting indie music, which only happens if people choose to pay for the music they listen to.

-john

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UPDATE (tuesday evening)

Here's what I think is a good compromise, and I'm going to give it a try:

1) I'm going to make all albums commercial-free for the first 20 minutes of the album. This means I'm also going to remove the advert at the end of each song that's been there. There will be the 5 second "you just heard" msg to remind you what you're listening to, but that's all.

2) After 20 minutes into an album, the adverts come in.

So... this means less interruptions that ever before... for the first 20 minutes of each album. And then ads (every 30 secs) come in after the commercial-free 20 minutes.

That way, you get to decide--interruption and irritation free--whether you like an album or not.

Also, this means that listening to the playlists in the "genres" section will be commercial free, as they only play the 1st song from each album.

Thank you, everyone, for your helpful comments and positive tone. You guys have been really helpful!