[Interview] Shehzad Daredia, CEO of Bop.fm

By B. Parker

The newly launched Bop.fm isn’t the next new music streaming service — it’s every streaming service in one place. In an age when every new startup seems to have the final answer in the business of something as abstract as music, Bop is leveraging the larger interests of the fan-pleasing platforms to streamline and personalize the music discovery and listening experience. Bop aggregates the most popular music streaming services — Spotify, SoundCloud, YouTube, Rdio, Deezer, Beats — under a single roof. With no need for an account, Bop.fm functions like an internet radio, curating playlists based on songs of your choosing. Unlike other internet radio applications that limit your choices or number of skips, users can pick songs or let Bop curate for them, sourcing the highest quality tracks from all of the major streaming services for free.

Bop’s platform also offers an interesting content management solution for artists and managers driving traffic to new music: with a single bop.fm link, users are directed toward all instances of a song, no matter where they exist on the internet, creating a consolidated source for a track. With the ability to aggregate all of the media sources and direct traffic, Bop may very well be the preferred platform for labels looking to keep fans engaged and in one place.

We caught up with Bop CEO Shehzad Daredia to talk about how Bop’s forward-thinking functionality creates a new model for music listening and discovery.

SoundCtrl: Is Bop.fm account based? How do you sign in?

Shehzad Daredia: You don’t need an account at all — we don’t like imposing these walls on you that everyone else does. So if I were to send you a Bop link to a song, you could play it right away. Now, if you wanted to create a playlist and save it, you’d have to create an account. We’ll probably have additional features like favoriting that will require an account, but to use the basic core functionality, we don’t impose registration.

You could sign up with Facebook or email, though we don’t currently have the ability to let you connect your individual accounts for say, Spotify or SoundCloud. That’s because we don’t really need you to do that. You can play through your existing Spotify account without you having to login, same for Rdio and Deezer. We do allow you to connect your Beats account, but you don’t have to connect all of your accounts to play through them. We can automatically detect if you’re a Spotify user, Rdio user, etc.

So if you’re a premium user of a streaming service, it wouldn’t change your access to Bop.

Right, it doesn’t matter if you’re a premium user or not, Bop can stream through your Spotify account and you won’t have to do anything in advance to make that work.

Does playback come from online or an app?

Bop right now is web and mobile web, we don’t have a native app yet.

What’s the prioritization of playback services used by Bop?

The vast majority of users out there don’t subscribe to more than one of these services, so they’ve never heard of Spotify, Rdio, Deezer, or Beats. Most people will be playing on SoundCloud or YouTube, depending on a number of factors, including availability of that song on those services, as well as availability of that service in that country. So if you’re in Germany, maybe the Vevo video wouldn’t available on YouTube, in which case we’d fall back to SoundCloud. Usually we’ll prefer YouTube, since YouTube monetizes for the industry, whereas SoundCloud will not. That’s the case for the majority of users, since most of them haven’t heard of the other services, much less have accounts.

Now for the ones that do, the next most common is that users have an account with one of these services. We automatically detect if they have a Spotify account, if that song is available on their device in their country, and then we would play back through that account. It’s very, very rare that the user has access to more than one of these services, like Spotify and Deezer, or Spotify and Rdio, so we don’t put a lot of thought or effort into which one we prioritize first. It’s somewhat arbitrary to focus on it, as .1% of the population has more than one music subscription account.

YouTube and SoundCloud stream at pretty low quality — is that cause for concern?

Quality is a factor we consider. It’s the reason why we’ll play from YouTube over SoundCloud, with others being equal if a song is available in both of those services. But we consider quality when we do our matching. If the only thing available on YouTube is a low quality UGC video, we’ll give preference to the higher quality file uploaded by the creator on SoundCloud. But generally speaking, we give preference to the official music video through Vevo or the creator’s channel on YouTube over UGC uploads.

Are you working only with files and content that have been appropriately licensed?

We give preference to music that’s been officially licensed. That said, YouTube is trying to change the model now. So it used to be a place where people would upload a bunch of UGC stuff and YouTube would tell the creators, “Tell us where people are infringing, and we’ll take it down.” And so license holders had to play “whack-a-mole.” But now, not only are they playing “whack-a-mole,” they’re playing “monetize-a-mole,” if you will. So now YouTube will monetize your content that is uploaded by other users, they’ll claim that content and share the revenue. They’ll also flag it as premium content with premium ads and rates. We can effectively infer, by looking at YouTube videos, which ones are being monetized for that artist, even if the artist or the rights holders were not the ones that uploaded it. So we give preference to the official channels, but we include the ones from other channels if we need to play through them.

So it’s opening Bop to as much music as possible while not infringing on any rights itself.

We’re basically linking to a song that’s on YouTube. We’re a DMCA-registered agent, so if we get a complaint that we’re pointing to a song that’s infringing content, then we’ll gladly take it down promptly. To this date, we haven’t received a single complaint. Part of that is because we don’t actually host the content ourselves; so if there was a problem, it would go to YouTube or SoundCloud directly.

Part of it is that even if it was infringing content, rights holders understand what we’re doing. We’re doing something that YouTube and SoundCloud don’t do in a scalable way, which is putting a giant buy button next to that content and pass ads through that content. And we’re pushing people towards the paid streams for that content, whether it be Spotify, Deezer, etc.

Do you have any recommendation engines that you’re running on Bop through the hosted services?

So we have recommendation in the app, you’ll see it in a few different ways. First, whenever you play a song on Bop through clicking a Facebook link or Twitter, when the song ends, recommended songs will start playing automatically. You’re effectively creating a radio station by playing any song on Bop. Secondly, on any song page, we’ll show you recommended songs, so you can navigate and see what else you might like. Finally, on our homepage, we have new songs and popular songs, and we’ll be expanding upon that to provide something tailored to your listening history.

How are you planning to grow your company and monetize your methodology for aggregating music?

Today, monetization isn’t the core focus. Today the focus is the growth of the product, focusing on the best user experience possible, and exposing Bop to an ever-growing number of people. That said, we have a short-term business model in place, and a path toward a long-term one. So the short-term model is an affiliate model where we drive subscriptions and upgrades to the music services and attract album sales to download stores, and getting a cut of the revenue that’s generated. So Rdio will payout about $5-$10 per user, per year for any newly referred subscriber. And then iTunes would give a standard 5-10% commission for a download.

In the long-term we’re a data play. We’ve already done 35 million song plays cumulatively since inception, and we’re doing over 100,000 song plays per day. So that’s 35 million play points growing at 100,000 data points per day. We’re releasing data not only on what’s popular and trending, but what people like at the individual level. We’ll be able to utilize that data to market to them accordingly, make ads, or sell that data back to the labels to help them understand who their customers are.

Lately, because of the fact that we provide the ability to share simple, universal links, regardless of country device and music service, we’re getting a lot of artists and managers utilizing us for their social media efforts. For example when Maroon 5 drops a new track and wants to promote it to their fan base, what link do they use? Do they use iTunes? That won’t work for Android users, and iTunes isn’t always where a song is first available, plus it’s 2014 and people don’t download at the same rate with streaming picking up.

So by using a single Bop link, a song only available on SoundCloud will play through SoundCloud. If a YouTube link is available tomorrow, it’ll play from that, and start monetizing for the artist. And next when it’s on iTunes, the buy button lights up, and when it’s available on Spotify and Rdio, we’ll start defaulting to those services. All the while, the artist and manager don’t have to touch that link, while Bop picks the best monetizing source for the user to play from. Then we consolidate the analytics for streaming, watching, and buying into one place broken down by things like country, device, browser, and time of day. So we’ve already gotten Jason Mraz, Hot Chelle Ray, Switchfoot, The GRAMMYS, using this with test campaigns, and we’re seeing momentum from this feature.

Be sure to check out the beta version Bop.fm online, and sign up for free for tailored playlists and recommendations.