How to 2X Your App Retention With This Overlooked Ingredient

Coming up, I'm going to share with you a simple thing that you can add to your app that will instantly increase retention. Stay tuned. What is up app nation? It is Steve P. Young, founder of appmasters.com, the place you go when you want action-packed content related to helping grow your app downloads and more importantly, those revenues. And part of those revenues are going to come with engagement. Today I brought on a great guest who's going to really break down how you adding music to your app. You're going to be surprised what types of apps can add music, but how adding music to your app can drive retention, engagement, and ultimately to your end goal of revenues.

Without further ado, let me introduce the guest. Her name is Lauren Puffpath and she is the co-founder and COO of and president of Feed.fm. Lauren, welcome to the show. >> Thanks so much. Happy to be here. appreciate the chance to talk about music always. >> Yeah. Well, thanks for putting this presentation together because I'm a big geek, Lauren, and I love it when a guest has a presentation and so let's let's walk through it.

>> Yeah, a little bit. >> So, you know, the I think the foundation is what we're all aware of. Like, it's just it's tough out there, right? The stats are brutal around retention. There's just so much noise. 46 notifications daily on average in the US for smartphone user. Very high deletion rates. And you know, retention rates are tiny. I know I personally have a once a month or so clean out my home screen and had just have a graveyard of apps that I had really great excitement and intention for, but I just couldn't really work them into my daily routine.

And so they're gone. So, one thing that oftent times product owners, brands, and growth marketers overlook that is actually a really powerful tool is music. It's as you think about your overall recipe for retention, there are a lot of different variables, so many different things to optimize. The music's really been overlooked for frankly a pretty good reason because it's traditionally been incredibly hard to license. It's pretty opaque in terms of copyright law and how things change.

And then let's say you do actually go do deals with publishers and labels. Then there's the extra lift of well, how do I integrate this? What, you know, how do I report out on it? How do I pay for it? So, it's sort of been um pushed to the wayside unless you have the capital of a Tik Tok, but that actually is changing. At Feed, we so we power music for a ton of different apps and connected devices and games and VR AR experiences and we do a lot of consumer research and what we find is that when music is really integrated in a seamless way, it increases time spent. So insession times increase, the propensity to download goes up, and ongoing usage goes up. So I think music has in the past been sort of thought of as a brand play or maybe a nice to have, but it's actually really impactful on the metrics that matter for subscription businesses.

So that that was self-reported data, which we love, but also clearly we're, you know, really focused on the bottom line for our customers. So when we look at a a pretty common metric that everybody is talking about and optimizing for D90 retention, the lift is really incredible. So 1.7x lift for users that listen to the music that's integrated into the app or uh connected device. That's that's meaningful. That that really makes a difference for a subscription business and and sort of that's where we come in as the ROI provider and handling all of the backend for the music. It's really cool.

>> But then, you know, the conversation oftentimes, especially when I'm talking to a broader audience with a lot of different verticals, it's like, cool, okay, I get it. There's some great data there in music works. I'm not building a music app. I'm not trying to be the Spotify killer. Like, what's the real use case here? And it's actually a lot broader than you would think. So, we power engagement across a ton of different verticals. One that we've gotten a lot of traction in is fitness.

I think that's pretty obvious. You know, 95% of users say that the music can make or break a workout. I think you said you're a Pelaton user. Pelaton's done such a good job of really investing in music for their users. And when they've I'm sure you're if you've been a member for a while, when they've made changes, it's been major brand uproar and you know, so much impact there. >> Yeah. >> So, connected devices, connected fitness, um that that one's pretty obvious. Social and UGC is actually another one that's growing incredibly thanks to the expectations that have been set by folks like Tik Tok. You know, music is really the hook that gets you to stop the scroll. And as you look at metrics around social and music use, 85% of people say that the right music with short form content means that they'll watch the whole thing. Like it even even in, you know, 20 second increments. It really drives engagement

as well. >> It's so true. And I think if you haven't tried to add music into your app, you don't know how difficult it is. Because I've had clients, people have been like, "Hey, can you understand some of those license?" Like, "Dude, I don't know." Like, and so when you guys came on board, I was like, "Oh, okay." Like some of the problems that I haven't been asked and solved by you guys. Yeah, I can talk a little bit more about that in a minute as well, but the there's the licensing the cost of it because um I'll just say the way music's distributed is a little bit antiquated and hasn't really kept up with how developers and growth marketers are actually trying to build their businesses. Like the timets just don't align. And so that's where we're we're really trying to make that connection and smooth things out for folks. Um a couple other examples. So smart devices the are there's some examples here. So you know smart speaker

everyone knows escape is actually a robot massager that's a really incredible experience. Uh electric mirror smart mirrors in hotel rooms. So music in this use case is really about taking a piece of hardware and elevating it to an experience like what's the experience you're trying to create in that environment. Uh retail is one that folks tend to think of in terms of background music and physical locations, but we've actually worked with a lot of brands on bringing that omni channel experience into their app and really focusing on e-commerce. And we did a lot of work with the analytics team in American Eagle to really look into how music listening impacted purchase conversion and found a 2x lift in conversion rates for users who listen to music while they shopped. Um they're a different demo, you know, that it's it's a little bit younger and so that you know their customers like to sit around in the app

and heart looks and listen to music and um so there it really made a huge difference for them. >> Interesting. Is it just a button Lauren that you just turn on like hey play music and play not play music within American Eagle? >> Um the exper so the experience in American Eagle is very simple. Yeah. You just click into like let me listen to some background music. >> Uh for for other customers it can be integrated into video content. There can be user choice. I want to go listen to you know personal preference. So it it really is up to our whole uh pitch with our customers is let's find the behavior points that matter for you and your app and then we'll figure out how to integrate music into that flow such that it drives additional engagement. So it's really customized.

>> Crazy. >> Um and then just a couple more. So games, that one's pretty obvious. I mean Roblox is a massive platform for launch and launching artists and discovery now. And then health and wellness. This is an area that we're particularly fond of because music has the ability to actually create massive change for individuals to take you from stress state down to calm. We work with a lot of companies on inducing meditation and sleep and um have actually started our own label of functional music which is music that's designed to take you either higher or lower or you know kind of change your state emotionally and mentally.

>> Amazing. I would love that. >> Yeah. Yeah. >> So yeah, it's like I said lot of different use cases. Um, and the what we really enjoy in working with all these different types of verticals is the ability to really customize as I said what that journey looks like for the individual user. Um, one example just to kind of ground it and bring things home is an app that we love. Swirkit is a fitness and wellness app and we've been working them with them for several years. When we first started getting into conversation, they were at the time taking users out to Spotify playlists or Apple Music playlists to listen to music. Music's so core to workout experience and that was creating friction. So, not not just clicking out of the app, but also there's a mental load to figuring out what you want to listen to that actually does deter people. We've seen the drop off rates, deter people from then going on to the

workouts. We want to remove all friction. We want people to get healthy, right? So with the integration with Swirkit, we found a 2.5x D90 retention uh increase when users engaged with the music. Yeah, it's really really impactful. And our curation team, we have a team of musicologists um smartest people in viz who use our rating systems and our proprietary backend that we built to keep everything familyfriendly. you know, Swit does a lot of work with kids and in schools and their brand is really relying on having the right content for that audience. Ryan, who uh we we both know is, you know, has has, you know, really been a great partner for us and just kind of reinforcing that message that it's wellcraftrafted music.

It's really seamlessly integrated and that's driven a lot of growth for them. >> Yeah, I've I've had him on the podcast. I mean, it's been years since we had him on, but I got to reach back out to them and do an update with them. >> Awesome. Love what they're doing. Yeah. >> Yeah. So, again, at the end of the day, it's about business results. Um, primarily where we work with our customers on their KPIs is engagement, so longer session times, retention increases, you know, that D90. And then also, interestingly, music is a really great carrot carrot for premium conversion. So, if you're going if you've got a premium model, including major label music, hits, you know, and love, that's a great carrot to get people over the hump to the paid over the pay wall.

>> I'm just thinking about different ideas that different apps can do this because I know Calm does this like share this thing, but like imagine doing something within the app and then doing some music or being able to create something within the app, just a video and adding like personal music on it, too. >> Yeah. Music is such a great connector and it's it's a really simple way to find togetherness and sort of weness in the world that is so divided especially digitally.

So then the question becomes okay that's strategically I get it how do I execute like how do I actually get the right music to the right person at the right time and we always say I know this is obvious but really start with who is listening to music is so intensely personal and so if you know not just demographic but also psychographic as much as as you can much data as you can gather around the individual that's going to mean that we can tailor the right experience and the right music for Um, and then there's the what, like what are their objectives? Are they in your app for escape and we just, you know, want to hang out and help them get there? Is it in a fitness context? Are we trying to increase heart rate, get them through the hard parts of the workout? If it's meditation, is it sustained um is it sustained focus and concentration? So, so understanding what their objectives are with your product.

And then that leads to the how which you were alluding to earlier that how will you license and stream which um is not obvious. So if you decide to go with a partner like VFM, there's a couple things that you want to look for. One is the pre-clared catalog. That means that the the music that you'll be leveraging to create these experiences for your users is all pre-clared. Copyright is good. Like you don't have to go get approvals for every song. Uh this streaming tech is is kind of an overlooked piece of it as well. So there's just dealing with the files, the music files themselves.

You have to ingest it. There's metadata, the information about the song, which is notoriously challenging to deal with geo filtering. So there is no global copyright law. The song that you can use in each country is going to be completely different. So hand handling all of those exceptions. Uh and then like okay you actually have to integrate or build you know the the mini Spotify in your app. So how how are you going to do that? And then the fun side of it frankly is the datadriven curation. We leverage LLMs and recommendation engines to make sure that we're getting as personalized as possible but then we also have that team of human curators which is incredibly helpful particularly for the brand overlay because we're we're creating experiences for end users but it's coming through another brand. So it's really important that we have their tone, their personality, explicitness, thematic, like thematically what what

they're comfortable sharing with their users. Uh yeah, and so that's leading to the payoff, you know, that's what we've built, you know, because it's traditionally been such a challenge in the industry. We're really trying to unify all of this into a single simple taking all the point solutions and just creating a single solution for our customers to make it easy. Because if you want to experiment, if you're talking to growth marketers, they don't have time to go do licensing and build infrastructure. It's like what's the what's the one installation that I can do to start testing?

>> Hey Lauren, I mean the maybe you're about to say it, but I I'm going to tee it up then, but you know, part of we have some like sleep sound apps and we're like, hey, how are we streaming this? We have server costs with every stream. I'm assuming that you guys take care of all that. Like I don't have streaming costs >> to worry about anymore. No. So there there are kind of two elements to it. One is the infrastructure which again we take care of all that. The curation, the streaming, we host all the files, we stream all the music for our customers and then the second is the the copyright and the royalties and that is essentially just passed through to our users to our customer.

>> Technically I could build another Sleeps app and just use Feed FM's library of music and kind of figure out something through that >> very easily. Freely. Yes. Very very quickly. Seriously, >> challenge accepted, Lauren. >> Yes. I love it. Yeah. So, again, just sort of bringing it back, you know, when we start working with our customers, there is a big brand element to music because again, it is so important for your personal taste and the brand recognition, but it really comes back to the performance targets. And so, we're always trying to understand their KPIs.

And typically we'll set retention goals for the for the pilot for the program, app usage goals, and then obviously no rights violations. Music is is a it's a latigious industry, frankly. And so >> it's really important for us to take all of that headache and all of that worry away for our customers. >> So that's the that's the story. That's the that's the music integration story. There's one app that I I've loved and I won't say it, but they started putting music as part of their they are sleep sounds app and they started putting music as part of their onboarding and playing it. Now I have no data on this but I really love the onboarding. They I asked them if I could share it. They said please don't. So I was like fine but the I just loved it because it is a sleep sounds app and through that they're like talking about how music drives sleep focus all this stuff and the music just automatically starts

playing. Lauren I just thought it was a great So much data. There have been so many studies over the last 10 years around sleep's ability to not just induce sleep, but then keep you sleeping longer. No side effects, no crazy ambient stuff going on. It's such a it's just a it's really powerful for a couple reasons. So reduces cortisol, which is really important obviously for sleep. And then um can trigger dopamine release too. So you're getting some feel-good chemicals, you're reducing stress, and helps you ease in and induce sleep. Hey Lauren, I'm sure people are wondering right now as they're listening or watching this like what is it what is involved in terms of costs for us if we wanted to start working with feed FM.

>> So it it really depends on the size of the app. Um we you know we can work with uh start we work with tons of startups actually and are there with them from the ground floor because it's all with music because you're paying out on uh royalties per song. It just depends on how much you're streaming. But we've got we've got a lot of different I mean we work with folks who are doing a thousand streams a month to 10 million streams a month. So we've got a lot of flexibility in terms of how we can support. So just tell them to give me a call and we'll >> All right. Sounds good. Well, if you do want to give Lauren a call, just go to feed.fm. Feed.fm. Let them know that you heard it on this podcast so that Lauren's like next time we see each other, we live very close to each other.

Like, okay, you owe me a coffee, Lauren. >> Let them know you heard on this podcast as well. Awesome. Thank you, >> Lauren. Anywhere any if the audience wants to connect with you anywhere else, do you want to send them anywhere else besides V.FM? >> Yeah, find me on LinkedIn. I don't think there's any other Lauren Puff Puffs out there. So, I'm easy to find. >> Well, I will link the link of Lauren's LinkedIn profile into your favorite podcast app and YouTube description.

Lauren, thank you so much for coming on doing this. >> Thank you. >> Thank you guys for watching. I'll see you on the next video.