The Right Song, at the Right Time
Chameleon provides low cost music curation and moment-by-moment selection to create a scalable, dynamic, and delightful music marketing service for small to medium sized businesses.
The Problem
- Small business operators miss opportunities for maximum probability by not considering branded multi-sensory marketing for their customer's user journey.
- Artists miss potential income because many businesses easily circumvent commercial licensing laws.
- Employees are fatigued by listening to the same licensed songs on repeat during their shift.
The Solution
- Sourcing music that fits the geographic region and brand through the Curator Network
- Analyzing chosen songs by sonic characteristics and storing them in the business's principal playlist
- Moment-by-moment song selection based on objective factors of the space. The smart radio serves as a personalized DJ.
Systems Design
Curator Network
The Curator Network is comprised of music experts, DJs, and playlist makers in each business's locale. People may apply to join the curator network and build their profile on their specialty e.g. highlife or lo-fi hip hop.
Curators are incentivized to provide songs in congruence to the business’s branding characteristics by being rewarded when the business owner gives a song favorable feedback. They avoiding losing access when too many of their suggestions receive unfavorable feedback. In addition, leaderboards will incentivize curators to perform as they can be hand selected by businesses and receive cash rewards, discounts, or other partnership opportunities.
This local selection system was designed to scale and foster a stronger connection between local businesses and their music scene. In addition, curators can visit the businesses to get a better picture of the space they are designing for.
Chameleon Application
Chameleon is a Digital Service Provider (DSP) hosting an individualized internet radio station for each business establishment. Business owners will be able to start the smart-radio and deliver feedback on their end device or set the program to automatically play during business hours. In order to comply with Sections 112 and 114 of the Copyright Act, they are not be able to choose songs on demand as the system does that for them.
The application uses a system named Guanine to match songs to objective characteristics of the space creating a harmonic user experience for the customer. For this MVP, Guanine uses 4 objective factors of the space to select songs from the principal playlist: time of day, occupancy, temperature, and weather.
When songs are added by curators, they are analyzed and scored by their sonic characteristics such as valence, tempo, acousticness, loudness, and energy. Throughout the day, Guanine checks the four factors and matches songs to fit that moment.
Visual Design
Visually, Chameleon is designed with a minimalist ethos, emphasizing clarity and deference to prioritize content. If the user chooses to display the device in their business, Chameleon’s has a display feature to showcase album artwork, and song and artist information.
The user has a few foundational actions they may take when using the application: sending feedback to the curator, play and pause, and volume control. Despite the minimalistic approach, each user action is met with subtle yet clear feedback, ensuring a responsive and satisfying user experience. By strictly adhering to these design principles, the app promises a user-centric experience that champions a licensed, branded music experience above all.
Prototyping
During my senior year at DePauw University, I developed the Chameleon MVP for my Computer Science and English Literature capstone projects. The program was installed on a Raspberry Pi connected to a sound system in the Peeler Art Center lobby. The location, with its large glass walls merging indoor and outdoor elements, was chosen to enhance the system's creation of a harmonic atmosphere between the objective factors of time and weather conditions and the space.
The prototype executed and terminated in accordance to Peeler business hours using a cron job installed on the Raspberry Pi. Throughout the day, songs would be chosen by the source playlist based on an aggregate score of outdoor temperature, weather, season, and time of day. The MVP was operational for one semester and gathered feedback from feedback forms posted in the lobby.
Following this trial, the prototype was awarded first place in DePauw's Annual Entrepreneurship Competition.
Ending the Project
Upon graduation I spent the summer interning in Alexandria, VA. After work, I interviewed local business owners on how they played background music in their place of business. The purpose of these interviews was to build empathy and understand the user's pain points, motivations, and needs for my next iteration of the project.
I discovered 92% of the businesses played music not in accordance with licensing laws thus circumventing the need to purchase an application that provides properly licensed music such as Soundtrack, Music Concierge, or Chameleon.
I quickly learned that current law structure is not well enforced. When there is scarce enforcement, there is a limited to no market. This could have been overcome by pivoting the idea to a novel, user-centric idea from interviews; however, I attended graduate school that August and decided to focus on coursework.
Lessons Learned
Hard Skills
- The product development lifecycle from identifying the market gap, defining the problem, designing, and building the solution
- Presenting and storytelling to stakeholders
- Interviewing and empathizing with users
- Music licensing law
- Building and managing teams
- Experiential Design
Soft Skills
- Phenomenology (a philosophy of experience)
- Pulling threads from multiple experiences into a novel idea
- Identifying the relationship between objectivity and subjectivity
Read more about the philosophical theory of this project here.