Note: This was mostly written for Music authors as that’s what I started out looking into, but the comments about Popular Items will apply to other categories too.
What’s changed recently for Music on Elements?
Two main changes:
- Popular Items ranking system for music tracks
- Replaces an older “item boost” system
- AI-detected item tags for Music tracks (theme, decade, genre, mood, instrument)
- These new tags are currently used in filtering only - the author-supplied tags are still used for keyword search
Why did these change?
We want to make sure Elements customers can find the items they need, so they are more likely to subscribe, and so they keep using their subscriptions for longer.
The biggest Audio customer complaint for Elements is the relevance of items they can find on site: when they can’t find what they’re looking for, they assume the library doesn’t have good content, and they go elsewhere to find music tracks. There are several projects that address different aspects of this problem, aimed at surfacing tracks the customers want to license.
We measure the impact of this in several ways:
- Customer interaction with the product. Are they making more searches, viewing more items, playing audio previews, downloading more tracks?
- Search performance. Are the items shown in search results more likely to be downloaded?
- Customer retention. Do they use their Elements subscription more? Do they continue their subscription for longer?
- Customer acquisition. Are we better able to bring in new customers for Audio items?
What are the details?
Our older “popular items” ranking had a lot of problems, as widely reported by Authors and Customers alike: it relied heavily on static boosts applied to selected items at time of publishing, didn’t respond to changing customer behavior, and presented a very similar “popular” lineup to customers from one year to the next. On Feb 1 we replaced that system.
The new system uses several data points to rank item popularity, focussing on how customers are engaging with the items in the library. The new system for item popularity is also continually refreshed, comparing item performance across the past 28 days to show a more accurate view of the items currently popular among Elements customers.
What’s the impact of this change?
There has been a strong positive impact on the main customer problems since implementing the new Popular ranking:
- Search-to-download ratios have improved significantly, so fewer customers are leaving the site without downloading something. This applies across all of Elements, with a huge boost to search-to-download in every item category.
- For music, Audio previews are also being played more often, showing that customers are seeing more relevant items. For other categories, there’s a comparable improvement in clicks through to item pages.
- Higher customer satisfaction results, particularly for Audio customers. We track this continuously, as it’s an early indicator of customer retention.
However, this changes the way the current pool of earnings are distributed. Until this change also impacts customer acquisition, there’s still a similar amount of customer revenue available to distribute.
Customers are using a wider range of items, which means that more items are now generating earnings, and those earnings are less concentrated into specific top items. As a consequence, some items that benefited heavily from the static Popular Items boost over the last few years are now being out-performed by other tracks, and portfolios that relied heavily on earnings from a small number of top items are seeing an earnings drop.
We recognise that this is frustrating, especially where earnings have been dominated by a specific track. However, we are confident that Elements is now significantly better at meeting the needs of our Audio customers, by addressing one of their primary pain points and improving the overall experience and perception they have of Elements. Over the coming months we’ll continue assessing the impact on cancellation and subscription rates: both of which increase the amount of earnings available, instead of just changing how it is distributed.
What else is on the way?
You won’t see many visible changes during the next quarter (Apr-Jun) as that team has been deployed to another project area, but more Elements Audio features will start rolling out from July onwards.
For music, some of the new features include things like a similarity search, allowing customers to provide their own reference track to find “sounds like” matches in the Elements library. Individual track variants will also be exposed directly in search. There’s a new Music category page on the way, adding more curated browsing of trends and styles. We will also be exploring how we continue to surface the most relevant results for customers when they search, as we have proven that this kind of investment drives subscriptions and downloads. This will include multi-modal vector search for music, which we’ll have a more detailed article about when it’s ready to launch.
