New BBC Music app delivers personalised choices

A new BBC Music app allows listeners to hear and watch the rock and classical songs they most want to experience via mobiles and tablets. What’s more, they can do this without having to put up with DJ chatter, news or competitions.

By building on their personal preferences, listeners and viewers also get exclusive cover versions (a feature of the LiveLounge show), live performances from festivals (including Glastonbury) and TV appearances (as Later…With Jools Holland), as well as interviews and playlists from its huge much admired music, radio and TV archives.

Users can also browse tracks played on BBC radio shows from the last seven days, and add songs to their own My Tracks playlist.

The app is currently only available in the UK and only accessed by consumers who sign on to allow the software to build a picture of their musical preferences based on genre.

Because of licensing restrictions on the BBC, the app only offers 30 second previews of commercially available tracks. Users get the full track when they export their playlist to streaming digital music service, such as Spotify, Deezer or YouTube.

The BBC predicts that recommendations by its high profile presenters as Annie Mac and Lauren Laverne will become highly influential. The app also incorporates its Playlister music recommendation service which presenter Zane Lowe set up in 2013 before he was poached by Apple to curate Beats 1.

BB Music Director Bob Shennan said: “This is just the start for us, and we want to hear from users over time to make the BBC Music app the best that it can be, so they can enjoy music from across the BBC – whenever and wherever they are.”

The broadcaster insists it is not trying to compete with the likes of Spotify or trying to phase out its DJs. It is setting itself up as an expert on curating and recommending. It will use the data collected on the app to tailor its iPlayer to viewers’ personal choices.

The new app follows recent moves as the switchover of BBC Three to an online-only channel and the launch of the paid digital TV download service BBC Store, which are heavy on curation.

In the battle to win users, discovery is the new battlefield where digital music services can distinguish themselves. It is grabbing influential online, radio, TV and print media figures around the world to suggest the latest in sounds and acts.

Spotify for instance hires people who come from music industry backgrounds of finding and breaking new artists. Its most popular playlist, Today’s Top Hits, currently has 5.8 million followers – about one out of every 13 monthly listeners. It says that it was through aggressive promotion on its global playlists that it broke Major Lazer’s Lean On and Hozier’s Take Me To Church.

By December 2015, its list of all-time most streamed tracks had Lean On on top with 586 million streams while Take Me To Church was at #4 with 476 million.

Australian acts it promoted heavily to a global presence include Vance Joy, Chet Faker, Troye Sivan and Iggy Azalea.