I think this graphic best captures listening behaviors- since people are different and their position in the graph could slide around a lot during their lifetime and even just during the day.  The x axis represents their attention to music playing where the left side is background music and the right side is paying close attention to what is being heard.  The y axis represents the person’s influence on what is being played with the bottom being very little selection control like listening to the radio and the top being direct- like picking a song from their collection of files/disks/records/tapes.

Even as the business of music distribution has progressed the green area graph which represents the cost for the experience hasn’t changed over the years.  When you don’t have direct control and don’t care that much about fidelity- because it’s background music, the costs are low (AM/FM radio).  When you want discrete control over what you listen to and in high fidelity (buying a CD) the costs are high.  Replace those today with streaming radio/Pandora and buying/streaming high bitrate audio files.

Each of the 4 quadrants drives certain demands for the best experience and here is what our research and opinions conclude about each:

A:  High level of control, low amount of attention.  This experience occurs when you put on an album, or queue up a personal playlist while working or doing other activities.  Many music listeners live in this quadrant because of the intense multi-tasking lifestyles they live today.  Requirements for people here are fast access to a well organized library, ease to ‘set it and forget it’ queuing so they can be free to do their other business and not be thrown off by bad music.

B: High level of control, high amount of attention.  This happens when you make a musical selection and really just sit and listen to it.  This often involves headphones and little else.  Sadly this behavior seems to be found less and less often and although not totally free of multi-tasking, it’s arguably also the experience of driving alone in the car with music on.  People tend to engage in more active listening then.  The car scenario complicates the requirements a bit- but essentially listeners need quick and direct access to exactly the music of their choice and high fidelity matters because as you really listen and get into the music, the audio experience is important.

C: Low level of control, low amount of attention.  Pretty much everyone at one point or another engages in this behavior.  Even if you were someone who didn’t identify as a big music listener, if you ever intentionally turned on an FM radio and tuned in a music channel, then you’ve lived in quadrant C.  This is most always used as background music for work, dinner, parties, etc.  The biggest requirement to satisfy listeners here is to play consistently good music.  The challenge is to quickly allow the listener to define their boundaries of good.

D: Low level of control, high amount of attention.  You can think of this experience as sitting with a friend while they play music for you.  I’ve most often experienced this on road trips with friends that are trying to surprise each other with good music no one has ever heard.  The requirements for this to work is to have the selections be surprisingly good and unique.  Since you are really paying attention, it should also be high fidelity and have an easy way to remember what you heard so you can go back and do some quadrant B work with it later.

So, in a nut shell that’s what HIFI is going to try to satisfy.  We’re not going to do it all at once, and as we analyze the competitive field, we’ve been plotting them on this coordinate system looking for the areas of immediate opportunity.  It seems there is a lot of attention in C (Pandora and radio-like services).  Turntable.fm lives in the C-D area.  iTunes and Spotify, MOG, Rdio, etc do a pretty good job of covering most of these quadrants, in theory.. but their execution leaves room for improvement.

We have been playing with a lot of existing 3rd party data sources over the last few months while we look to jumpstart our humble little app.  One of the companies we have been connecting with is Decibel.  When speaking to Greg Kris last week, he said something which I felt very accurately sums up the state of music distribution today.

When discussing our crazy idea to charge people to listen to music (and my explaining that everyone thinks we’re crazy, because “no one wants to pay for music today”) he simply said that no one has ever paid for music.  People have always paid for the experience.  In the digital age, consumers are speaking out about what they feel the experience is worth:  nothing.  People download music without paying for it because they don’t value the digital experience.

“It’s up to us to make an experience worth paying for” is how he closed it.  Let’s go do it!