Case Study
Simplified Music Licensing for On-Demand Fitness
Contents
The Client
Our clients come from a deep background in the music and fitness industries giving them unique insights into the challenges associated with music licensing for on-demand fitness content. Their relationships across both industries offer a distinct advantage as we collaborate to solve this challenge.
The Challenge
Music licensing, particularly synch licensing for on-demand playback, is incredibly difficult.
Think about your favorite song…
Even though that song appears on one artist’s album, it may have been written by five different people during a late-night studio jam session. Each of those artists is represented by a label. And a publisher.
And every one of those rights-holders has to sign off on, and earn a cut of, each use of that song. This makes it nearly impossible for the average fitness instructor to secure rights to use that song in an on-demand class.
The Plan
Leverage our knowledge and relationships to make music licensing easy.
We began this project with a Discovery Session designed to crystalize the basics such as problem, goal, opportunity, key players, immediate challenges, and more. This level-setting exercise ensured that our team approached the problem on equal footing with a foundational understanding of the issues.
We followed the Discovery Session with a series of customer interviews focused on clearly understanding the role of music for fitness instructors.
The Solution
Align playlist creation and licensing to instructors’ existing workflows.
Our interviews were followed by a Design Sprint focused on defining the core user experience of an application designed to simplify music licensing.
We then developed a prototype offering users a clickable walk-through of the end-to-end experience which we tested with users from our target audience (some of whom were in our original interview group and others who were new).
Once the idea was validated through our user testing and we confirmed that the experience was (at least directionally) on point, we turned our attention to gathering the necessary data for negotiating song licenses.
To accomplish this, we created a custom business intelligence tool that allows us to gather data from fitness instructors to more clearly identify the most used music across playlists.
The Outcomes
In Their Own Words
"The Apollo 21 team helped me ideate and iterate a service that I have wanted to start for years. I had the vision; they helped me draw the road map and gave me confidence around the tech we needed to build. Whether for a start-up or an established business, B-to-B or B-to-C, they build and sustain a company’s forward momentum."
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