Why lyrics? Why translations?

Working at Deezer for almost 2.5 years and coming from entertainment companies (france.tv and CANAL+), I have been accustomed to what we call metadata. Metadata surrounds the content while not being the content per se, just like an artist’s image, for example. Metadata enables us to contextualize the content and use it as an additional layer to the user’s experience. Lyrics are a form of metadata, but they are special. They are so special that I call them “queens of metadata.” “Queens” because they are what makes a track yours, what makes you sing your lungs out, whether you’re having fun with friends, or whispering your favorite lines on your own. They are the additional layer that makes you feel the music. At Deezer, we have been pioneers when it comes to lyrics — we were actually the first to showcase lyrics in our product. The lyrics feature was already quite advanced at the time: accessible from the player, the synchronized text that auto-scrolls as the music goes along and users can navigate in the track by clicking on text lines; finally, users can share all or part of the lyrics on social media or private messages. The experience was not bad, yet we knew we could aim at having more impact on our users with this feature! We knew that we could go further by being even more innovative. My intuition was that we could make users more engaged, thanks to lyrics. To reach this extra mile, we already had strong quantitative and qualitative knowledge and hypotheses we needed to validate.

At the time I started working on it, the lyrics feature was used by 40% of our user base. It is a highly loved feature, and users widely express their thoughts on it. Based on user feedback, I drafted a list of priorities, which included readability and translations in particular. Readability — font size basically — for obvious usability and accessibility reasons. It was clearly about solving a known issue with a negative impact on usage — many people would complain about the font size being too small. Translation, however, was more of an opportunity. Indeed, it was not the most common feedback we got from users. Still when interviewing them, we quickly realized how deeply emotional the relationship between a user and a track could be. Lyrics are actually a tool to amplify emotions. We needed to make something out of this intangible concept, to make it concrete through a feature. Not only would it enable people to re-discover tracks they love, understand them and connect with their feelings, but it could also address some unspoken needs, such as learning new languages! It was much more qualitative than quantitative, of course, but I saw a huge opportunity there to get back to our users’ hearts with a powerful enabling feature. This was it: I had a vision for this part of the product, and I crafted it.

From idea to MVP

Based on my new vision for lyrics and digging into this opportunity, I was soon able to draft objectives and key results to measure the impact we could drive: we chose penetration rate and streams per session as leading indicators. The more I worked on the topic, the more I was convinced the maximal value would come from translations. Therefore, with a clear vision and defined OKRs, it was time for me to develop a team and stakeholders roadshow! I wanted to get the buy-in and support from Design and Tech teams but also the legal and publishing teams. In this sense, this initiative was a great opportunity for me to learn and improve my assertiveness skills — an uncovered field of product management, i.e., making sure all the people involved were with me, fully onboarded, committed, and… aligned with the vision! Given that lyrics and translations come with a lot of legal issues and constraints, I had to make sure that we were acting as one all the time.

Kicking off the design of our MVP (Minimum Viable Product), we quickly realized that adding translations would increase the need for a rework of the UI. Indeed, we were about to ask users to read two lines in two different languages at once. It is a real challenge for the eye, and we didn’t want to lose users on the way. So it was a real UI challenge for our Design team! We had the opportunity to test the first designs at a UX session, which was a great opportunity for us to validate some hypotheses and also to get an idea of what should be refined. Fun fact about this: to determine whether the text was correctly highlighted, we included a German sentence in a French translation, and nobody noticed it during the test…even though testers claimed they were happy with the way it looked!

User not noticing some lyrics are in German: “I think it’s very easy to read”
“I could use it for American rap for example, when there are difficult words”
“I would use it to understand what Coldplay’s songs are about”
“Amazing, I’m often going on Google Translate”

Strengthened by our User Research work, we were confident enough to decide what should be part of the MVP and what was unnecessary. Making prioritized decisions is the day-to-day life of a Product Manager (PM), yet it is rarely easy. I personally largely resort to the RICE methodology to do so. I made sure to inform all stakeholders and to carefully listen to all comments and doubts about the choices that were made.

The next item on the list was to work with our lyrics providers and partners: LyricFind (providing the lyrics) and MusicStory (matching lyrics with our catalog). It was really crucial for me to include them in the ideation process and to also share with them our roadmap, our needs, and our ambition. I know from experience that the quality of our experience is tied to the quality of our partnerships, of how much of their bandwidth they allocate to develop our catalog.

I also needed to make it contractual! Both LyricFind and MusicStory teams were excited to work with us on this new feature. We met several times to define together what would be the most suitable process to retrieve translations, make sure our top catalog was translated, and match translations with our tracks. In addition to the discussion about processes, it was also the perfect occasion for Tech teams to design and build the best solution possible in regards to translations in order to insert and attach translations to the right tracks in the right language.

Finally, I must mention something crucial for a new features launch success, that is too often put on the back burner by PMs: the relationship between PMs and Product Marketing Managers (PMMs). This collaboration goes far beyond the go-to-market plan and clearly needs to happen as early as the discovery phase. Why? Because discovery is as important for PMs to understand the undercover needs of users as it is for PMMs to work on the positioning of the feature. A powerful feature such as translated lyrics had a strong potential from a marketing perspective, so I wanted to work closely with the PMM in charge, even for prioritization matters so that we could set the long-term vision and ambition together.

At the end of the day, working on lyrics took us three months from conception to (iterative) deployment. More than 20 people from many different departments were involved in making it live and driving impact on millions of users!

All the things I did not anticipate and…learned!

As you have probably understood by now, getting back to our users’ hearts through lyrics was a long and insightful journey! In particular, I learned three main lessons on the way that I think are worth sharing:

• Do small, think big — One of my missions at Deezer is to ensure the quality of our catalog. I wanted our translations to be the best and to be as close as possible to the original artist’s intention. This is not easy, and I decided to choose quality over quantity. So we launched the feature with 5,000 translated songs in approximately eight languages. I did anticipate the small initial amount, yet we did not know how we would proceed to make it increase over time quickly . I should have better prepared for this and brought up the contractual part of this process sooner. Today we have over two million translated songs, which covers 12% of our lyrics catalog. And it keeps growing!
• Be humble, always — What a great humility lesson! The Product Manager’s role can be split into two main activities: discovery (of the problem and of the solution) and delivery (i.e., building the feature and iterating on it). I have been working in product management for five years now, and the more I grew, the more I tended to think I mastered delivery. I was so certain of mastering it that I thought I wouldn’t have to spend too much energy on it. But that’s precisely when and where I failed. I should have been more humble. We went live with a two-week delay for a reason I could have easily foreseen and didn’t anticipate enough. What a great occasion to remind myself that brilliant PMs are always humble and question themselves, even on the things they think they can manage effortlessly.
• Don’t take anything for granted — In the music industry, anything can happen, even overnight! We need to be ready to adapt and adjust all the time. As an example, we had to withdraw 55% of our translations on a last-minute decision of one major publisher. We then entered a round of fierce negotiations and eventually got them back!

And now what?

Since the release of the translated lyrics feature, we have continued iterating on lyrics, listening to user feedback, and closely monitoring our dashboards and KRs. We have increased the engagement of the feature and of the product in general — the feature’s penetration rate just reached close to 50% of MAUs. Moreover, the number of daily lyrics displays has grown by 25% since April 2022, and average session lengths per user have increased by more than 30% since the beginning of 2022.

From a PMM perspective, the feature launch was a real success, with 164 hits in the press after the press release (on April 11th) and 211 million estimated readers! From a product perspective, we clearly had a positive impact on users’ lives, as well as on the business. Measuring the added value of emotions is not easy, yet emotional layers are what make music experiences unique and different! And the road to our user’s hearts is never over; following up on lyrics translations, there are some other major improvements we would like to make on the product, such as the availability of lyrics offline, for example.

Fancy a try? Meet the queen of metadata on Deezer!

Check our open positions to join one of our teams and help us amplify the emotions of millions of users!

Lyrics: the product journey to get back to our users’ hearts was originally published in Deezer I/O on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

When the old and new worlds meet

When thinking about Deezer, many of us see a digital-born company, based in the “new world” — this tech era we live in. As much as we are honored to work in a thrilling creative environment, we must not forget that music didn’t wait for streaming to exist. Neither did metadata.

“Metadata” stands for a set of data that describes and gives information about an object, for example an album. Song titles, artists, contributors’ names, as well as release dates are all metadata. In the music industry, a release date, i.e the day an album was released can be physical or digital. The physical release date is the day an album was released as a CD or vinyl in a specific country. The digital release date is the day when an album becomes legally available online.

Release dates are delivered to Deezer by labels and providers along with the music audio — we receive albums (and their tracks) together along with their associated metadata. We then ingest all this content to make it available and stored in the right place in our product.

At Deezer, we used to struggle with release dates. Which one to choose? What should we do when it’s incorrect?

At this point, you may ask yourself “Why is it tricky for Deezer to display the right release dates?” The reasons are many: release dates can differ from one territory to another, labels sometimes make mistakes when inputting them, fans build their own databases, etc. Basically, it is all about transposing the good ole CD / vinyl world into the brand new digital one. All of this makes release dates an exciting topic for a Product Manager (PM) because it’s tricky and very dependent on the industry, it impacts all music fans and Deezer users, and it has to do with trust and collective intelligence. I wanted to write about this to bring up a product perspective on a complex topic: the crossroads between tech and the music industry.

Start with the problem

Read between the lines

Identifying problems is the number one job of every PM. The occasional display of wrong release dates has been a known issue at Deezer for quite a while. For example, it was never reported that Bob Marley & The Wailers’ albums were actually not released in 2020. Such issues could be explained by the fact that we mainly used physical release dates, and when those dates were unavailable, we sometimes displayed digital dates instead. Because an album is a piece of art, its release date should stay consistent over time. This is why we chose the physical over the digital release date. The problem was, we used to only rely on the information provided by labels. However, this information is not always correct, sometimes there is a confusion between physical and digital, for instance when it comes to re-editions.

So, we were not happy with the release dates we displayed. But, the real question was, is it a problem?

That is when it got exciting for a PM: defining the problem. Let me take you through the steps I followed.

Step one: start from facts, not personal opinions

It is not easy to rationalize problem identification when everyone already has an opinion, or when the issue has been known for a long time. The more I talked to people, the more I collected ideas on solutions, impacts, and even mere feasibility. Opinions are not facts though, and I needed to know more about our users to determine whether we had a problem or not.

I had plenty of information to start my investigation: reasons why users churned (as declared when they unsubscribed), results of user interviews conducted by our User Research team, comments on social networks (including our Community website), and app store reviews. I decided to read and observe everything related to metadata in general.

Step two: be data-informed and not data-driven

Being data-informed allows us to interpret the data by acknowledging and understanding its limitations. Depending on the company’s structure, a data-informed or data-driven mindset can be more effective. It was hard to get quantitative data about release dates but I had a ton of qualitative feedback on this issue. Using cold data, as it is, was nonsense in that situation. Going through all available materials again and again, I understood that I had to read between the lines. I attended many User Experience (UX) test sessions (on totally different topics) to show as much empathy as possible with users who brought up metadata and catalog issues. I wrote down users’ comments verbatim, observed their behavior, and whether they used metadata or not to make decisions during their journey.

Step three: bring context to the problem

At the time, I focused so much on finding the right data that I almost missed the point. I had to take a step back and look at the situation within its context. Actually, the question was not “Do people care about release dates,” but rather “Do they impact Deezer’s business?” That is when I understood something crucial when talking about music: trust and expertise. So I met with the music experts at Deezer: Artist Marketing and Editorial teams. Together, we were able to build a first draft of what we call “album fundamentals,” i.e. the necessary set of information a user needs to understand an album as well as the level of information Deezer should provide as a music expert. Later on, I discussed this topic with user behavior experts (meaning the User Research team) to refine users’ emotional expectations.

It turned out release dates were a real problem for our users but it was implicit. For some people using a streaming service, learning and improving their knowledge is part of their emotional journey into music. Building a relationship with a digital streaming platform based on trust matters a lot to them. One phrase I often use to describe the situation is: “I have to go on Google to know more about what I listen to.” In a word, people expect Deezer to provide them with truthful music expertise. Another thing that is very important to fully appreciate and understand the problem is the notion of ordering. In artist pages, we display artist discographies ordered by release dates. Therefore, erratic release dates were partly responsible for messy discographies — which means it was hard for users to find what they wanted to listen to. Yet, we want Deezer to be the most intuitive music app. 17% of users churning for product experience reasons did so because they couldn’t access or find their content. Now, you can understand why it was a real problem.

Build a solution

Collective intelligence

As a Product Manager, I am lucky enough to work with many different people. A part of my role is to maximize team efficiency to design the best solutions. To do so, I am a true believer in and advocate for collective intelligence. Collective intelligence is the ability to share ideas and knowledge within a group of people through collaboration, collective efforts and co-design. There are many brilliant people out there so it’s all about making sure everyone can raise their voice and make the most of their talent.

A talented Data Engineer on my team had the idea to compute what we soon called “original release dates.” Back to the idea of an album being a piece of art, not only do we need its release date to be consistent over time, but also to be the first original worldwide. Original release dates are based on an algorithm that basically compares multiple internal and external sources, and chooses the best one. Indeed, release dates are sent by labels, but there is also another data source that we should not ignore — music fans! On collaborative platforms like MusicBrainz, fans have listed almost every release date for almost every album in almost every territory. It’s the beauty of crowd-sourcing.

We decided to use this algorithm for all official albums in our catalog. What we call “official” is an album that is part of a discography that our Metadata Curators manually verified and curated. Original release dates then go through a whole technical pipeline: from a database to our catalog for the backend to serve it to all necessary clients such as iOS, Android and web. This way it is displayed throughout the product and can be used for ordering discographies.

I believe it is part of the PM’s job to be able to hear what contributors have to say. The Data Engineer on my team already had the idea for quite some time but never had the chance to implement it since no data had been gathered before. My job is to identify problems as much as possible to leverage collective intelligence to bring users what suits them most.

And…it is also my job to be able to measure the success of a feature.

Deliver, measure, iterate.

Before launching the feature, we iterated a lot to make sure original release dates were accurate. Thanks to a predetermined dataset of almost 2,000 albums, we were able to refine the algorithm and the methods. The goal was to determine the first ever release date by comparing dates listed in MusicBrainz, dates given by providers, and dates indicated in copyrights and producer lines (both are legal dates that are sometimes sent by providers). Each time we added a new comparison element, we would review the dataset manually to find out what was best.

I also decided to clear the scope of this feature to ensure a reasonable time to market. Easier said than done. It was a good exercise for me, as a PM, to learn how to keep focused and stay realistic. To do so, we finally decided to limit our external comparison system to MusicBrainz, at least at first. After hours and hours of thinking, trying, learning: original release dates were born.

Yet, a feature in production is worth nothing if we cannot measure its success. It was the hardest part, where I faced a lot of constraints and limitations: how to quantitatively measure something as qualitative as trust? I questioned myself a lot on the notion of trust. Is it one of the reasons why people churn? Yes. Is it the only one? No. How do we simply measure such a change then? I went back to my first hypothesis; by computing original release dates, I assumed users would more easily find the content they want to listen to. Therefore the bounce rate on artist pages, where the discography section is, should decrease. And then my second hypothesis on trust: by computing original release dates, I assumed users would trust Deezer more as a music expert. Therefore they would be less likely to churn for “missing content” reasons.

Taking a look at the Deezer community and users’ feedback, we were able to spot some errors and iterate again. For example, we allowed Deezer’s Metadata Curators to override original release dates — thus correcting some flaws in the process.

The first step of a long and exciting journey

With original release dates, I had the chance to bring a product perspective to a very music and tech savvy problem to solve. Thanks to collective intelligence, product vision, and technical efficiency, we clearly enhanced our music expertise. This is the first step toward enriching Deezer’s metadata for album fundamentals.

I am delighted I could take part in this beautiful cross-functional expedition. At the end of the day, this is exactly what Deezer needs: a solid music industry expertise, a deep understanding of user behavior, a clear view of technical possibilities and constraints, and finally a product vision on trust and the power of metadata. This is the first step of a long and exciting journey!

If you would like to further discuss this topic, share your feedback, or if you have suggestions on how to measure metadata improvements, feel free to reach out!

And if you wish to be part of Deezer’s long and exciting journey, have a look at our open positions and jump on board!

Getting release dates right: a product perspective on building trust was originally published in Deezer I/O on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.