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The current music industry landscape is great. There are a wide variety of streaming platforms with a common goal — to make music more accessible and discoverable. This is a technology trend we should celebrate, a market which users have choices and have the freedom to find a service that works for them.
A few popular music streaming services
Being in a such competitive market, different platforms create features that make themselves more appealing to their audiences. Anyone who uses Spotify or Apple Music knows that "Discover Weekly" and "New Music Mix" are probably some of the best ways to discover new content. Stations are another great way for exploring new artists and music. Those features create utility for listeners, and provide artists a bigger stage for their music. But at the same time, they create a dichotomy.
In order for the market to be truly competitive, a user should be able to switch from one service to another easily, and enjoy the benefits of the new service instantly. But all those 'convenience' features are built based on users' listening history, music preferences and all previous interactions they had with the platform. Switching to a new service with a "blank sheet" means that users have to spend a period of time building up a new pattern that already exists with their old streaming service. This is the invisible "switching cost".
Freeman is a tool to make switching music streaming services easier. It focuses on two objectives — transferring your music and personalizing your library.
This is the "easier" question of the two. As long as I can create a mapping of tracks between one service and another, the problem is solved. And ISRC is the golden ticket I am looking for. Even though each service assigns a unique id for soundtracks, I can use ISRC search functionalities from a given service to locate the unique id.
International Standard Recording Code — an identification system for all types of audio content.
For transferring playlist, it would be similar to transferring library tracks. I just have to create a playlist in the destination platform first and insert the tracks.
Conceptually this seems to be a harder problem, but technically not as bad. I have to look at how each service approach the problem.
Spotify — It is relative simple. As long as the content is added to the library, it will be considered for related content suggestion. I don't have to do much about it.
Apple Music — Just adding tracks to your library is not sufficient, but you also have to like/dislike the tracks to give it more weight. In this case, I give the option to users for personalizing their library after they have transferred their content over
Given that we already have the unique id for soundtracks, we can use those to personalize the new library.