Vertigo Music was founded back in 2014, but its offering has never been more relevant. One of the best parts of listening to music and discovering new artists is sharing the experience with friends and fellow fans, and Vertigo allows users to do just that.
“Collaborative listening features have always been part of our UX,” says Daniel Yen, CEO of Vertigo Music. “It’s just a bit fortuitous and coincidental that we happen to be focused on a feature that lends itself to being used during the current climate.”
Through the Vertigo app, Spotify and Apple Music subscribers can stream music together in one place, with the ability to engage with each other via chat. It also offers an opportunity for artists to engage with their fans and boost their streams on both of these platforms.
Earlier this year, Vertigo officially launched its new Artist Lounges, the latest iteration in its social features. “Over the last couple months, we’ve been having conversations with labels and artists, and the reactions have been extremely positive,” shares Yen.
Lounges are automatically created on Vertigo’s app for every artist on Spotify and Apple Music and are spaces where fans of the artist can come hang out, listen to the artist’s music, add songs to the queue, and connect with other fans.
Artists themselves can also claim their lounges in order to obtain host privileges — they simply sign up and get verified through Vertigo’s site to link their ID to their lounge, which “immediately unlocks much deeper engagement tools that the artist can utilize, like go live with video, audio, and pin chats, to engage with fans in their lounge,” explains Yen.
Artists also receive detailed analytics reports on their fan demographics and streaming data to help them inform future strategies. And even if the artist isn’t on the platform, it still offers a social and communal experience. According to Yen, “It’s a 24/7 hangout room for the artist’s fans, whether the artist owns their lounge or not.”
When artists go live on the app, they have the option to invite all of the members of their lounge to join, and Vertigo’s algorithm also automatically notifies the lounge members multiple times as the party grows and more people join the stream.
The app has been and will continue to be particularly valuable to smaller artists by giving them an avenue to connect directly with their fans. Yen shares that several artists have started to experiment with the feature and test it out for things like listening parties when they drop new music. Some have popped into their lounge every few days to keep it warm and continue to build their community.
One of the major advantages of Vertigo is that streams happen directly on the platform: “The whole time that fans hang out and interact either with each other or the artists, they're driving streams,” says Yen. “It's basically a non-stop stream-generating machine. Other platforms, like Twitter or Discord, can host listening parties, but artists then have to drive fans off the platform to go stream their music on Spotify, for example.
“Those platforms are great for community when it comes to engagement and conversation, but they’re not directly streaming their music. Instead, why not invest and build your community in your artist lounge, where your music is streaming at all times?”
In addition, because Vertigo is integrated with Apple Music and Spotify, there are no licensing concerns that users need to worry about. For example, each user has their own activity wall, to which they can post their favorite playlists, albums, etc. as well as photos and videos with music. “Unlike on TikTok,” notes Yen, “users on Vertigo are not limited to how much of a song they can post to their profiles — they could post the whole music video if they wanted to.”
The next feature that Vertigo plans to make widely available on the app is pre-recorded content with music stitched in — artists will be able to debut new music videos and stitch in music from Apple or Spotify in real-time to drive additional streams.
While demand for digital engagement platforms has ebbed and flowed over the past few months as live events come back and fans are starved for in-person interactions, “my hope is that our platform becomes agnostic to the pandemic,” says Yen. “Whether or not artists are out touring and having concerts, they're still wanting to drive streams on Apple and Spotify because streaming revenue is significant. The hope is that they will invest in building a community on the platform, where it's directly tied to driving streams.”