Music and audio
Audio is listened to in the background, on a locked phone, in a car, through a speaker in another room — and almost never with the app in front of you.
Background playback is the product, and it is where most of the platform-specific work lives. Audio has to keep playing when the screen locks and the app is suspended, show correct controls on the lock screen and in the car, respond to a headphone button and to a voice assistant, duck for a navigation prompt and resume afterwards, and survive being routed to a speaker mid-track. None of that appears in a feature list and all of it is what makes an audio app feel broken or not.
Licensing determines what you can build far more than technology does. Rights are granted by territory, and reporting obligations are usually per-play with specified detail, which means the play-logging system is a compliance mechanism rather than an analytics nicety. Podcasts are a different world with different economics and different measurement conventions, and a platform that treats a podcast episode as a long song will produce numbers that neither advertisers nor rights holders accept.
Discovery is what makes a catalogue feel large or empty, and it is mostly editorial rather than algorithmic at the start. With no listening history there is nothing to personalise from, so curated playlists and human programming carry the early experience — which has a staffing consequence people rarely plan for. Algorithmic recommendation becomes useful later, and it inherits the same trap as every recommender: without deliberate exploration it converges on the popular and the catalogue effectively shrinks.
How we work
- Background playback, lock screen, car and headphone controls are treated as core scope, because that is where listening actually happens.
- Play logging is built to the reporting obligations in the licensing deal, since it is a compliance system before it is analytics.
- Early discovery is editorial, because personalisation has nothing to work from until there is listening history.
What this includes
Pick what you need and send it over.