The Dream of DJ Rafe
Dear Music Apps (most recently Spotify),
I don’t want an app about music; I want an app about soundtracking my life. Sure, being able to pick songs and follow artists is OK and all, and should probably be a feature of the app I’m imagining, but it’s not the app. It’s the “manual override” mode in the app, the time in Google Maps where you add towns you don’t actually want to stop in to Google Maps to trick it into directing you around a bridge you’d rather not deal with at rush hour. It’s the exception to my use of the app, not the rule.
What’s an app about soundtracking life? It’s an app with buttons, or maybe voice prompts or something, that mimics the behavior of an intelligent and broad-based DJ who follows me around and spins tracks for what I’m doing.
To help us understand what I want from the life soundtracking app, I’m going to tell a story. In this story, we’re going to imagine that I won the lottery, and I pay a silent, strong, towering but gentle DJ slash bodyguard to follow me around all the time and play the right thing. My AirPods connect to his phone, and I never have to adjust anything.
A Daydream of DJ Rafe
This DJ is amazing. His name Raffaelito, but he goes by “Rafe” (rhymes with “strafe”). He’s heard of every song, listened to 80% of the audiobooks ever recorded as of last Tuesday, has the best curated list of intriguing podcasts outside the CIA. And most importantly, he’s paying attention.
When I see my 2 year old daughter dancing excitedly for me, we rock out to “We can Be Banana Bread” without even knowing it was going to be perfect moment. When I’m trying to get coding done and I need to send something into the noise cancelling headphones just to be able to hear myself think, probably due to said 2 year old, hours of lyrics-free, interesting but not distracting, just-up-tempo-enough lofi filter through the AirPods like so many autumn leaves.
When I’m driving late at night, and a little tired, the throbbing rock anthem I didn’t know I was missing pounds through the air and keeps me alert. (Ok, really if I won the lottery I would never touch a steering wheel again in my life, but this is about music, not chauffeurs.)
When it’s my turn to do the dishes (I didn’t do a very good job with my lottery winnings, apparently. Maybe Rafe is really, really expensive), childhood nostalgia comes through, just loud enough to be heard over the sink and make the time go faster.
When I’m on a long walk or on the treadmill in some hotel gym, he gives me an audiobook or podcast just technical enough to keep me learning, without making me do math in my head while I’m sweating. When I’m running outdoors, the music is good and the tempo matches the desired pace of my run.
And when there’s a truly beautiful sunrise, I’ll look around and realize he’s not playing anything, because he knows his limits, and that sometimes a soundtrack would detract from a perfect moment, not add to it.
The Reality of Apps
Of course, I didn’t win the lottery (as of this writing), and I don’t have a perfect DJ following me around everywhere. I have various apps that cost between $5 and $20 / month (as of this writing) that have various UI problems.
When I see my 2 year old daughter dancing excitedly towards me, I try to open up some music player app and by the time I type “We can” in the search bar she feels ignored and has moved on to trying to feed plastic fruit to her baby sister.
When I’m trying to get coding work done, I open the app (Desktop Version!) and type “coding music” in the search bar, and can usually get to work without being distracted by all the choices. Maybe I’ll even get lucky and find a playlist without lyrics. Since I don’t have Rafe DJing for me, the volume levels and tempos will wander around a bit, break my concentration, make me fiddle with the volume knob, etc.
When I’m driving late at night, I might start some tunes, but I can’t search for anything from the drivers seat. So I’ll end up listening to whatever pop music is the fewest clicks from app open, or even just hitting “seek” on the FM radio and hoping someone will play something that isn’t an ad for a car wash.
When it’s my turn to do the dishes (remember I didn’t win the lottery in this version), I’ll end up losing 3 or 4 minutes of dish doing time trying to find a playlist or podcast I might not hate, and then spend the rest of the time trying to dry one hand enough to ride the volume knob so that I can hear over the sink and not go deaf.
When I’m on a long walk or the treadmill in some hotel gym, I’ll listen to the first 5 minutes of 10 different podcasts that for some reason can get ads from mattress companies but can’t get their guests to use a microphone that sounds better than a battery power home karaoke toy from the 90s.
And of course, I missed the beautiful sunset because I was looking at my phone, distracted after clearing a push notification about a Dua Lipa concert 973 miles away with tickets going on sale late next April.
So what’s a Spotify PM to do?
(I don’t know anything about Spotify the company; I assume they have product managers.)
The crucial difference, of course, is that DJ Rafe, after a few early missteps that were handled with perfect professionalism, doesn’t ever need to be told what to play. I’m not advocating for the app to surveil me and guess what I’m doing; I’m advocating for the app to want to be told what I’m doing not what to play. That’s what I mean by an app that’s about soundtracking my life, rather than an app that’s about choosing songs.
I think, basically, I want a lock screen widget with a few buttons on it, corresponding to different activities: dishes, driving, toddler, coding. And it plays music that fits a narrow model of what I want when I’m doing those things, not what I’d like in general, or what’s popular in general.
This is probably what Pandora was telling investors they were going to do in 2008. And I did spend a lot of college studying with my study station on in Pandora in the background, so maybe they’ve succeeded more than I give them credit for. My memory of Pandora is that the stations eventually all started drifting together, and then someone told me to try Spotify, and then life was really busy for a long time. I wonder if my old iPod Nano works?
I hope this post has done a bit to illustrate the difference between the app as the product manager sees it, and the app as the user sees it. Spotify ain’t no DJ Rafe.
Anyway, Till next time, happy learning!
–Will
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