These days, it appears that everyone in the social media business is looking to throw their hats into the music arena. Twitter tried it, Spotify is perhaps so popular thanks to its social hooks and one of the most frequently shared things on social media are music videos. Snapchat recently brought music under their wing with the introduction of soundtracks to their videos, allowing users to play music from their phones while recording a video, thus giving them a soundtrack. This is an interesting feature as it gives users more flexibility when creating their videos and share connected memories around a song with friends. Now though, Snapchat could be planning more music features for further releases.
As The Guardian is reporting, Snapchat’s head, Evan Spiegel, says music is “really appealing to us right now” and that “after communication, [music is] the highest frequency behaviour on your phone and so that in our view, makes it a really interesting opportunity and it’s something that we are thinking about.” It would seem like Snapchat is considering rolling out more features based around music and discovery. Snapchat Discover is perhaps just a peak at what Snapchat has in the works for music discovery and curation. In the fallout from the Sony Pictures Hack, Spiegel was described as thinking that “every music service in the market is shit and he wants to be a curator. He doesn’t want to build a music service but he would like to have a record label so he could focus on the artists”.
Now that it’s pretty easy to get your music online, for a set fee every month and basically listen to as much as you want, wherever you want it seems like curation is becoming important again. The lossless streaming service Tidal is a prime example of a service trying to push curated content over machine-suggestions. Music is everywhere these days, and it’s so easy to fall into the trap of listening to what’s suggested to you by a computer, it would seem like Spiegel looks to move away from that, and as someone that find music a very personal experience, I can’t blame him. How and when Snapchat expands their services is anybody’s guess, but the company has been adding features at a decent pace over the last year, so we’ll keep our eyes peeled.