It’s Not An App! It’s A Content Platform.
Our last post introduced our new app MusiQuest as potent learning software. We explained how MusiQuest actualizes the aspirational buzzwords of education through activities that teach kids to create their own music in different styles. Playing with MusiQuest for even a few minutes will make its extraordinary potential clear.
MusiQuest’s potential as a business, however, is less readily apparent. The pessimistic case is simple: MusiQuest is an app, and apps don’t make money. Yes, the App Store paid out nearly $15 billion dollars in 2015, but mainly to a small cadre of superstar developers whose products transcend the standard app experience. Unless your app is a front-end for basic human needs (Uber, Airbnb, Tinder, Open Table, etc…), or offers truly exceptional entertainment (Clash of Clans, Spotify, Candy Crush, Netflix, etc…), you’re unlikely to make a lot of money through the App Store.
Our answer to this understandable pessimism is that: MusiQuest isn’t an app. MusiQuest is a content platform that enables new types of interactive experiences with music. Our technology is designed to empower people to creatively interact with music’s incredible breadth and depth of content; from the motifs of Beethoven’s 5th symphony to electric guitar riffs. Serving this one-of-a-kind content to people through an app is a platform choice, and while working on mobile comes with real challenges (the label ‘app’ not least among them), it also comes with an unprecedented opportunity to democratize music education/creation for billions of people around the world.
MusiQuest’s prospects for profit become much more exciting once you understand it as a content platform, not an app. To explain why this is true, let’s look at some major current trends in startups, and how MusiQuest fits in.
1) Exclusive Content Is Hot
There are many more people online than ever before, with another 2 billion set to buy their first smartphone or tablet in the next 5–10 years. All these people are producing and consuming an insane amount of content. Benedict Evans’s excellent work on the mobile ecosystem documents exactly how dramatic this change has been across many types of media; from text and photography to music and video.
But, this mobile-driven increase in content consumption hasn’t been good for all content producers. Ben Thompson of Stratechery argues convincingly that the internet’s ease of use allows people to spend their time on only the best content available in any given vertical. That means only publishers with differentiated content will thrive. As Thompson puts it in Differentiation and Value Capture in the Age of the Internet:
“The thing about Internet scale is it doesn’t just have to mean you strive to serve the most possible people at the lowest possible price; individuals and focused publications or companies can go the other way and charge relatively high prices but with far better products or services than were possible previously. It’s working for Apple, it’s working for Taylor Swift, it’s working for Omni Software, and I can’t wait to see the sort of companies and products it will work for in the future.”
Individuals (on YouTube, Snapchat, Vine, etc…) and companies (Disney, Netflix, Buzzfeed, etc…) around the world affirm this dynamic by constantly experimenting with new types of media. Producing and selling differentiated content can be a great business (and exclusive content is the most differentiated of all). MusiQuest fits this pattern perfectly because it creates a brand new type of content experience — learning to create your own songs, or interacting creatively with your favorite songs — in music, a medium that people love deeply.
Platforms Are Also Hot
Platforms are great because you don’t have to create all of the value yourself. Building the right type of foundation will encourage other people to create and add value on top of you, igniting network effects that drive exponential growth. This dynamic is well understood at this point, but also so powerful that the search for new technology-enabled platforms continues unabated.
MusiQuest is not yet a platform, but it will become one soon when we open up the internal tool we use to make interactive musical experiences to those outside of Edify. This creation tool combines advanced management of music parameters with guidance options (currently just voiceover and text instructions, but more are coming soon) that empower teachers, music lovers and even amateurs to build activities for others to play with. Allowing anyone to create and experiment with their own content is the best way to unlock the vast breadth and depth of musical subject matter, which is why it’s critical that MusiQuest is built to be a platform that a community forms around.
Content Platforms Are Hottest
Differentiated content is great. User generated content is even better. The tricky thing about differentiated content is that it’s normally difficult (i.e. costly) to produce. Facebook (and also YouTube, Instagram, Pinterest, etc…) is so successful because it has tons of high-quality (and often exclusive) content that they don’t have to pay for because users generate it on their platform. Netflix, on the other hand, either has to invest to produce it’s own content or purchase content from others.
Minecraft and Twitch are good examples of new creative content platforms that capitalize on user generated content. Minecraft is particularly interesting because of the time many people take to build worlds and experiences for other user’s benefit without any expectation of financial reward. It’s easy to imagine that passionate music lovers might make similar efforts to introduce others to their favorite music (whether that be ’90s Cuban Rock, or Tchaikovsky) through MusiQuest.
MusiQuest Is A Content Platform
In conclusion, MusiQuest is a very young, but highly differentiated, content platform. Our core technology allows us to easily produce interactive content that provides a novel and fun experience with music. MusiQuest is also built to allow enthusiasts to produce their own activities for consumption by others, dramatically increasing our potential to unlock the depth and breadth of musical subject matter for people around the world.
We currently expect the most compelling long-term content on our platform to be experiences where people learn about and remix popular music. We are working to pursue these licenses now– with the expectation that parents and schools will eagerly pay to support this type of creative learning experience for their kids.
But, regardless of whether these assumptions turn out to be correct, MusiQuest is positioned to succeed as a business because of its nature as a platform that can be used to produce all sorts of interactive musical content. From live-streaming composing sessions with popular artists, to Massive Online Multiplayer Music Making, to our current focus on elementary education, its easy to imagine a wide range of differentiated content being created (and hosted) through our platform. If that does end up happening, MusiQuest will make a lot more money than anyone would expect.
