A rant about companies outreach and how accessible they are

Studying branding and marketing of youth, you can see a few trends and patterns that everyone tries to exploit: personal image (e.g. clothes) and entertainment (e.g. movies, games and  music).

As such, music plays an important role in my everyday life, be it a car driving to work, listening to it while working and of course having the best running music. I know I should probably also sleep with some light music turned on, but for some reason that doesn’t do it for me.

And there’s also greed. The idea to have as much of music as possible, even though it might humanly impossible to listen to all of it, let alone to actually appreciate it.

Following this idea, Spotify seemed like a perfect online service. Reasonably priced access to almost all the music one could want. I’ve evaluated this for a month now and finally decided to cancel it.

Here are some of my reasons behind it:

• Bad music discovery execution. Having all this music out there should make it easier for me to explore new things. Giving me iTunes like interface where I actually have to know what I’m looking for is not fulfilling enough.
• Quite a lot of music is missing or there are just a few tracks available as part of different collections. It’s annoying as it acts like a teaser.
• I’d like to see more obscure music in collection. It’s great to most of the older mainstream in there, but I don’t feel that’s enough.
• Genre browsing sucks. Why can’t I easily see all the Blue grass music they have?
• .. and many more rants

While these things are annoying, they’re not fatal for my usage of the product of itself. What made me quit in the end was bad communication from company. I’d like to believe in the product through participation and seeing the changes they’re making so I can somehow influence experience and it’s just not there. Sure, they answer some Get Satisfaction support questions, but overall it’s like they’re doing branding for Swedish audience with very little outreach to other users.

I’ve been thinking for a while now about this and I believe that’s an important step for a startup to get early adopters. As detailed change logs as possible, with personalized kudos to people who reported specific bugs and you then fixed it. This coupled together with an outreach and voting solution to give community a power to steer the product in their way should provide a good ground to build a loyal fan base.