Today sees the release of a new BBC Music application for mobile and tablet. Executive Product Manager Chris Kimber describes the range of content available on the app and the features that ensure a personalised music experience.
This week we are releasing the first version of a BBC Music native application for mobile and tablet, available on iOS and Android. The app is packed with exclusive live music performances, interviews and playlists and will be personalised to your musical taste. Put simply, the new app offers users a personalised slice of music from the BBC. It’s also the first BBC native app that asks users to sign-in to BBC iD before they start using it.
The aim is to make sense of the very wide range of content encompassed under the BBC Music brand, complementing the music programmes available in BBC iPlayer Radio and BBC iPlayer. The BBC Music product on both web and native app now also includes all the functionality previously offered by the BBC Playlister brand, in a way that we hope users will find easy to find and use.
Why a music app?
As my colleague Ben Chapman notes, the BBC already invests significantly in the music genre, from radio stations, TV programmes, live events, news and online content. We want to make that a coherent offer for audiences looking for a music experience, no matter which area of the BBC that content originates from, or what platform it was originally broadcast on.
Mobile has become such an important platform for music consumption, with many commercial music products focusing their efforts in this space. Looking at the usage data for BBC Music online, the clear trend is towards portable devices, which together make up well over half of all our web traffic.
So for BBC Music to have an impact with audiences it was clear that we had to have a great mobile experience, and in addition to making our website perform well on mobile devices we wanted to take advantage of the opportunities offered by native apps to offer a more personalised and seamless experience.
The BBC Music app homepage on iOS tablet
What does it do?
While the BBC Music website offers a comprehensive browsing experience (including articles, artist pages and genre aggregations), we wanted to keep the native app focused on music discovery and consumption. Thinking about the wide range of music content produced across the BBC, we feel the best way to do this is to gather some basic music preferences upfront to allow us to offer a more tailored content offer.
So once a user has signed in to BBC iD and answered a few simple questions, we can then offer relevant short-form audio and video, including live performances, mixes and artist interviews. Our belief is that while we produce high quality audio and video content, the missing element is the one place to easily find all that’s relevant to the individual user.
Main menu options and curated playlists on Android mobile
Music discovery is key to our mission at BBC Music, so we have made our curated playlists available in the app, where users can preview short samples of all the tracks or listen in full via one of our partners, Spotify, Deezer or YouTube. Tapping the “Add Playlist” button on one of these playlists allows users to keep track of the latest tracks added to it by our presenters and programmes via notifications on bbc.co.uk, and improves the recommendations we can offer.
Similarly, we have now included BBC Playlister capability into the app, which means users can add tracks to their own personal lists (now called “My Tracks”) then export that list to one of our partners for full playback. Adding tracks helps to feed our recommendation engine, so the more you add, the better the recommendations get.
Lastly we have included our Find A Track feature, which allows users to find any track played on BBC Radio over the past seven days by selecting a date, station and time.
Users can add tracks to their personal playlists (shown on Android mobile)
What next?
We’re excited to be releasing the app and website changes this week, and we’re really looking forward to finding out what our users think is of most value. So we’ll be closely monitoring feedback and using it to help us decide what to build next. We’ll be releasing monthly updates to the app, taking on board the feedback we receive from our users.
There’s a Feedback link in the app Menu, or you can send feedback on our website via our Feedback page here.
Download links
The BBC Music native app is available on iOS (versions 8 and 9) and Android (versions 4.1 and above).
BBC Music on the Apple app store
BBC Music on Google Play
BBC Music on Amazon
