Why is innovation in music so slow?
A tweet from Product Hunt founder Ryan Hoover made the rounds this week that captured the sentiment around music innovation:
I'm surprised there's no music-centric social experience online at any meaningful scale.
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He’s right, there isn't.
Music doesn't change much while the rest of the tech world innovates at the speed of light. The reason is pretty simple…
Everyone building in music eventually gets rugged in one of two ways:
The slow rug - spend years negotiating with labels over copyright, eating up all your runway.
The fast rug - build on Spotify API and get access revoked.
This is why it’s exceptionally hard to build in music.
The slow rug
If you want to build anything that includes music itself, you need to brace for a long and expensive licensing process. Twitch just spent four years trying to lock in music rights for livestream DJ sets. By the time the deal was done, consumer behaviour has moved on and music activity on Twitch is down 50%.
Twitch is a large, well-capitalized company. Now imagine a startup with limited funds trying to build a social music experience and securing music rights. Almost impossible.
The fast rug
The alternative to building with music rights is to build with music data. Apps can tap into APIs from Spotify and other music services to pull (a limited amount) of data to create new music-based products, or include music data into existing apps.
However, that API access can be pulled or changed at any moment.
Our first app idea for Oscillator was dead on arrival because our Spotify API request was turned down. And we're not the only ones. This has been a recurring theme for music startups for the last decade.
In 2020, music playlist app Songshift had its API access threatened because it was syncing playlists from Spotify to competitors like Apple Music. (Spotify later relented but with restrictive measures).
In late 2023, Spotify laid off 15,000 people, approximately half of those from the engineering teams which we're led to believe is having a large impact on the open API access. The layoffs also inadvertently halted one of music's most-loved genre encyclopedia websites "Every Noise At Once."
As a startup, building on a music API is a game of Russian Roulette. How far can you go before you get shot down?
Creating an un-ruggable music ecosystem
This is why open protocols like Oscillator are crucial for music innovation. We need an open music database that apps can tap into without fear of being rugged.
Oscillator is open source and will belong to everyone, so anyone can request data and build on top of it. Sure, one app might decide to stop sharing data with Oscillator but the network effect of dozens of others ensures that no app can be fully rugged by anyone else.
Obviously we have a long way to go until we can compete with the legacy music industry, but with millions of onchain data points around music, we are already making progress.
Our approach at Oscillator is to avoid the slow rug (by limiting our exposure to music copyright) while building the defence against fast rugs (by creating a shared global state for music data).
Instead of restricting access to information and gatekeeping who can access it, we want to make it available to all.
This will speed up innovation, spark new apps and products, and potentially unlock billions in trapped value from the music industry.
Want to be part of it? Get in touch through our new Typeform.
