Queues are the backbones of any music experience. Over the years we have become used to seeing queues with 2 elements:

1. Manually controlled up next.
2. Recommendations based on currently playing songs.

Although it works well for solo sessions, the experience is painfully outdated for social listening!

There are three main problems:

1. Unless we intervene manually, the tracks that are queued first play first. Gets really cumbersome for large queues.
2. The recommendations are tuned to the current song, and personalised for the host at best, not the group!
3. Lack of control.

An algorithm controlled social queue

At @lishashmusic we believe that have solved these problems, and created the best social queueing experience our there. The following is an overview of how everything works, what’s so special about this queue, and why it might be relevant to you.

Let’s start with the star of this experience: the social queue. In Lishash, when someone queues a track, it does not directly go to a sequential up next, but an intermediate, algorithm controlled, queue.

If you want even more control you can have it of course, by dragging tracks to up next manually like we are already used to.

The social queue can be controlled by 4 different algorithms:

1. Auto
2. FIFO (First in first out. This is how current up next queues work.)
3. LIFO (Latest tracks play first)
4. Random (Any random track from the queue can play)

Designing for inclusivity

Let’s dive deeper into the default auto algorithm first. Imagine that you are a part of a digital music community. Around 25 of you are listening to music together. The theme is “nostalgia bangers”. People go absolute bonkers, and some of them queue 5–10 songs in no time. The queue is quickly sized at around 100 songs. And here you are, poor chap, who managed to add their first track only after 50 songs were already in queue. What a disaster.

Especially in online communities, situations like these can be really alienating! Even more so if you are a new member. You can’t chat as you don’t feel comfortable yet, and you feel what you consider important is getting ignored. Frustrated, you drop out.

That’s precisely what the auto queue algorithm takes care of. It:

1. Prefers people whose tracks have played the least till now.
2. Prefers tracks that match existing filters.
3. Prefers people who are online. These together create a delightful social listening experience.

The language of music

Also, notice how you see who queued the track. This seems like a small detail, but is an absolutely essential conversation starter! You feel immediately engaged in the discussion, without having to force yourself to chat and be loud. Music, not text, becomes the language here.

The auto queue algorithm, the welcoming vibe it creates, combined with the “music language” allowed us @lishtedaars, all strangers a year ago, to form some of our closest relationships.

If your community / group is about music as well. You can do it too!

Express the vibe, with 0 hassle

Which brings us to the last two problems with current music queues: Lack of personalisation for groups, and no control.

Social music is not limited to online digital communities (where everyone is actively queueing). We listen to music all the time with friends (IRL & remotely), in common spaces like cafes, clubs… and a lot of times we don’t even know what to queue, but have rough ideas like:

1. Songs that all of us have been in love with recently.
2. Songs none of us have heard, but are from this particular genre.
3. Upbeat loud music that all of us will like.

…

Now the best our Spotify, Apple Music and Youtube can do is to let us enter a song that we think matches the vibe, and give AI recommendations tuned to US, again, US, not our group! Or we can create a playlist beforehand maybe? Or take suggestions one by one? Well…

What if rather than going through all this hassle, we could just express the vibe like “happy upbeat WE ALL like”, and tada the perfect music started playing? With @lishashmusic you can do exactly this by playing common tracks first, and even fine tune it as much as you want!

Moreover, you can set the vibe by selecting from a vast array of filters like happiness, loudness, speechiness, genres, languages, artists, albums, tags, release year……. The amount of control is unparalleled! And not just for your library, but for everyone in the group!

Dawn of a new era

The possibilities that these filters enable in social settings are endless, and I’ll write a separate blog about filters sometime. For now, because we already saw a digital social example, let’s take a look at what can be done IRL with this…

Imagine you enter a cafe with a chill jazzy vibe. You scan a code, and boom you can now add your own tracks to queue. The cafe puts a jazz filter, to protect the vibe. When your track plays people in the cafe can see you queued it, and it opens so many possibilities to socialise!

Music events in digital communities, lounging in cafes themed around music, hanging out with friends over music (IRL/URL) are just the beginning! With the Metaverse hot on our heels, music is going to become an essential socialising medium, and this queue refactor was long due!

Our vision at @lishashmusic is to be build this future putting humans (and our wellbeing) first, not * insert cool jargon *.

We launch to the public in early 2023 🚀

Join the waitlist and follow us for more updates like this.

A deep dive into social music queue design was originally published in Lishash on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

We all love Spotify. They somehow keep coming up with features that win our hearts over and over again. 40 Million tracks at one place, discover weekly, daily mixes, collaborative playlists, and recently blend ❤

There is something magical about discovering the music we and our friends love! Something that brings us closer, something very intimate. Moreover, the fact that the algorithm gives a mix of tracks we all love + songs loved by only one us, and is able to update the list daily is simply amazing! It’s not just a bonding agent, but a great discovery tool as well. A beautiful use case of these blends that I have seen is to listen to them when you are missing your friends. It’s one of the most wholesome use of technology imo ❤

But, what if these blends are just scratching the surface of something much richer underneath? What if the social and discovery experience here could me made orders of magnitude better? What if Spotify Blend:

Allowed us to control the discovery ratio

Yeah AI is great, but sometimes we want more control, right? What if we don’t want any common tracks at all in our mix, and just want to discover each other’s library. Or maybe, on the other extreme, we want only the tracks that all of us love to feature in the playlist. Spotify’s AI currently abstracts all these controls away from us. What if WE, not the AI, could control the mix?

Could be combined with filters WE control

My best friend loves death metal, but I hate it. On the contrary, I love classical, they listen to it sometimes, but right now are not in the mood for it. Ever been in a similar situation?

Now, is there a way to tell Spotify to remove all metal, and classical tracks from our blend? What if we also want to say that hey Coldplay is fine, but don’t put a particular set of artists? Currently, we can only give implicit feedback like “don’t want this”, but there is no way to explicitly set a group of filters in real-time.

The same goes for filters like loudness, speechiness, and release years. The algorithm decides everything for us. What if we want to listen to happy music that’s not extremely loud, and loved by both us? It’s a very likely scenario on a road trip for example. Blends just don’t work here, the only option currently is to manually curate a collaborative playlist. Wouldn’t it be amazing if we could just specify these filters, and no additional effort was required?

Was not limited to people we already know

If we want to create a blend with someone, we send them a link, right? What if we want to blend with people who might share our music taste, but are not friends with us? What if we want to meet new friends via music?

The best way right now is to share your blend link on social media. But let’s look at it from the perspective of the receiver: why would I blend with you when I don’t even know what you like? A good hack will be to specify, along with the link, what genres/artists you like. Yeah then it can work. But what if all of this could happen within Spotify itself somehow? What if Spotify had a community layer as well?

Had a chat & listen together functionality inbuilt

Hanging out with friends becomes extremely fun when listening to music that you all love, together.

Currently, if you want to listen to your blend with friends you first need to create a Spotify group session. Now, if you want to have a conversation while listeing together you either need to chat on discord/whatsapp etc. or get on a an audio/video call. Instead of having to do these 5 things at different place, what if all of these just happened seamlessly from one place?

Worked with friends on other streaming services

Not all of our friends are on Spotify. Wouldn’t it be amazing if blend could somehow look at their libraries, and create a shared playlist for us? Currently, each streaming service has their own algorithms and libraries, with no interoperability in between. What if we had a social layer that connected all of them seamlessly?

Unfortunately, there is only so much a single company can do, and Spotify might never be able to put all these features in their main app. However, using their API, we have already built these experiences in Lishash, and they work together seamlessly. The funny part is that all of this functionality has existed on the app the for 2 years now. Yes, a year before blend was even released in beta! If you would like to try out these features yourself, please request access to our community from here.

What if: Spotify Blend was originally published in Lishash on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

20 years of Swarathma — and they’ve made music that spans across themes and sounds alike, some people have come and gone (but stayed in legacy) and yet some things remain interminable. With Swarathma, it seems to be evolution and change. And an astute and discerning sense of understanding how the social structures around them are constantly changing, are in constant flux. There’s no resistance to fusion, to new sounds, to new mediums of messages. In fact, they seem to be bedrocks of the band.

One of these open arm acceptances of a new medium was how they moved to digital as the pandemic struck. In search of genuine conversations and connect with their listeners, they made a Discord server and started a hang out series called #andOtherStories. Besides the ground breaking music of Swarathma, this desire to stay connected during times of despair, is what made us reach out to them. And am I glad we did.

Yesterday, we had the band host a Stories and Swarathma session on Lishash and it was an experience unlike any other we’ve had. We’re still trying to put our fingers on what exactly it was that felt different but it was probably the verve, the desire to tell stories and the dynamic shared by the band members. We were joined by Jishnu Dasgupta, Varun Murali, Vinay Ramakrishnan and Vasu Dixit (unfortunately Sanjeev Nayak couldn’t make it) and they took us through the stories of some of their own tracks, the stories behind them and just really… hung out with us and with each other.

From funny origin stories of songs that we have all listened to for ages now,

to Vasu’s umm… jokes (no just kidding, dad jokes like these are foundational tenets of Lishash).

Conversations ranged from song themes and production to experiences to gigs and straight up banter. Here’s a peak:

Here’s to more songs, stories, and Swarathma.

Written while listening to Koorane, Agla Savera, Dus Minute Aur, Naane Daari, Ee Bhoomi, Pyaasi.

Sign up for our community from here.

Swarathma & Stories was originally published in Lishash on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The community at Lishash loves sessions around artists — from discovering their albums or their discography and our team had always wondered why. Despite there being genres to dive into and themes to traverse, why is the most popular session type users choose to create one’s where they’re listening only to the music by one artist? It took us a while to understand, but the best way to explain and illustrate this is the session that took place on A.R Rahman’s birthday. It was a session that lasted for ~17 hours, where folks listened to A. R Rahman’s discography.

The beauty of this was in realizing that it’s very rare to find friends in our daily lives who love an artist as much as we do. The community finds, in each other, people that are excited about similar artists, music and themes. And the app gives them a place to explore, express and bond over this shared passion.

The breadth of conversation that music that moves us brings, is phenomenal. It ranges from the role each track/album plays in ones lives, and can go on to the themes they covered, too.

Rahman’s music and this session is also testimony to how passion and love for music is pan-lingual and enjoying it has little to do with comprehension of the language, rather the music, the emotion and the people itself!

Artist Discovery: A R Rahman was originally published in Lishash on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

We are living in times of unprecedented digital growth. Instagram is the prime example: what started out as just a picture sharing platform for photography enthusiasts (a vertical) has now evolved into a space where people share all of their life’s precious moments and feelings constantly. The exchange is no longer limited to pictures, users now frequently share text, music and videos on the platform. Even payments happen within the app now. Entire businesses run on it. This phenomenon is called horizontal scaling.

Successful founders preach about it, novice founders dream about it, investors drool over it, and the media loses its shit when a company shows promise of this scale.

The Convenience Trap

A full on war against real life

Hungry? Your favourite food delivered at your doorstep in literally 10 minutes; no hassle of getting a reservation or wasting time in traffic. Want to meet new friends? Here is a custom made feed of people with identical interests as you. No stress of meeting random strangers, and figuring if you have anything in common. Digital experiences are designed to be extremely convenient, immersive, and personalised around us specifically, while in real life we are the ones who have to adjust. It's no surprise that we have started spending an increasing fraction of our times in the digital realm now. More time in the digital realm means more demand for digital goods, more demand sparks more innovation and more innovation creates more convenience. This is not some utopian virtuous cycle, but an extremely dangerous trap!

Hacking the human brain

To keep us hooked to their products, digital platforms use something knows as the variable reward design: Youtube, for instance, shows you a different feed on each refresh, rather than giving the same recommendations every time. This is where the trap begins: humans can pretty accurately be modelled as reinforcement learning agents whose main goal in life is to maximise satisfaction. Basically, if any action gives us satisfaction we’ll do it repeatedly. The first use of a digital product entails immense satisfaction because of the convenience and novelty it provides. However, after repeated use the law of diminishing marginal utility (DMU) kicks in and the satisfaction from each additional use decreases; we start getting bored of the product. Adding a small variability to each experience tricks our brains into thinking that we are consuming something new every time, the DMU never sets in, and our repeated activity basically never stops. We get addicted to these platforms!

Think of the last time you opened Instagram or Youtube just to get lost in their feeds, and felt guilty later for wasting your time. Once addicted, we start using these apps for hours even without any internal trigger, and passive consumption becomes a habit. All of these hours are literally being stolen from our real lives. We find ourselves mindlessly checking our phones right after waking up, while eating, while working, you name it. This leads to a state of constant distraction and conflict about whether to focus on our real lives or virtual ones. A state we call dissonance.

A Life Of Balance

Life can be defined as the union of our digital (virtual life) and physical (real life) presence: the psychological state of perceiving yourself to exist in a surrounding context (who you are with, where you are etc.). Historically, humans have spent almost all of their time in the physical realm, and we are now in an era where we spend majority of it in the digital presence. Contrary to this trend, our mission at Lishash is to help people enjoy both facets of life to the fullest, and to do so we have developed a framework that maximises harmony between digital and physical presence by minimising dissonance.

Presence first, Verticals later

For harmony to be the norm, for it to thrive, we first need to create an environment to nurture it. Right now, the horizontal scale culture ensures that users spend majority of their time in the virtual world. However, for harmony to exist, an equal proportion of physical presence needs to be created first.

At Lishash, we ensure this balance by sticking to the vertical of social music, while scaling across both digital and physical worlds. In the purely digital realm we enable users to listen to music together, and hangout with friends (or meet new people) in the process. The common music taste creates a really comfortable environment for everyone to let all go, and completely immerse in the experience. To achieve this same immersion in the physical realm we have created vibes that allow you to augment whatever you are doing in real life, with music, in a single tap, without any choice overload. The real life group sessions also achieve an identical effect by allowing you to play everyone’s favourite music in a tap without the hassle of finding common preferences.

Moreover, before we even consider moving to a vertical like travel or food, we will ensure that we are present across all facets of life that involve music and people. For instance, our next frontier in the physical realm is offline meetups that are as organic as our online listening parties. Simultaneously, in the virtual realm we are planning to integrate into the metaverse to create even more immersive shared digital experiences. This diversity creates ample opportunities for a user to engage with our platform in the most holistic way possible, and serves as the cornerstone for harmony.

Augment. Don’t Hinder.

Virtual and real lives have almost always been at war with each other; we are unable to immerse in either while the other is present. The primary reason is the attention hungry design of digital platforms; almost all of them have feeds that are designed to suck you in, and end up making you so addicted that you find yourself opening these apps even without any trigger. This becomes a major source of dissonance as we saw earlier. To ensure harmony in our lives we need to design interfaces to augment real lives rather than hinder it.

Staying true to this principle we have designed Lishash in such a way that the only reason to open it is a clear internal trigger:

1. Whether it is to discover new music, or listening to it with friends, or to augment a real life activity with vibes, the user always clearly knows why they are opening the app.
2. There is no feed of static content that you can consume passively or get addicted to, even the sessions disappear after they are stopped.
3. The only notifications you get are from friends, and that too only when they are addressed to you.

Everything is very consciously designed to minimise the interference and dissonance between digital and real lives. Whatever presence you are in we try add value to it rather than becoming a hinderance.

Harmony becomes the norm

This manifests a society where the constant battle between virtual and real life simply disappears; both coexist together in harmony. Keeping you hooked to your digital devices does not make people money, allowing you to experience and fully immerse in all of life’s facets does. Balance becomes the cornerstone of our lives, and provides a perennial source of fulfilment and satisfaction.

A big challenge in this journey is the conversion of real life purists; to make them believe that digital life is equally real. Similarly, we’ll have to provide extremely engaging physical stimuli for folks already addicted to their digital presence in order for them to get out of their comfort zones and seek experiences in real life. This requires the development of extremely immersive augmented experiences first; significant innovation on the hardware side is a mandatory prerequisite for that, and might prove very time consuming.

No matter how difficult they seem, these are tractable challenges, and once we overcome them we’ll have all the infrastructure ready to cherish every moment of our lives to the fullest, and let all go.

Design for Harmony was originally published in Lishash on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The Good Life

Every time we find ourselves on social apps, we get a taste of everyone’s good life. We see people meeting their fitness goals, checking items off their Bucket Lists, and we see them flourishing at work. We see them experiencing new things, with people who love them. People tend to broadcast the parts of their lives that are desirable and so we find ourselves amidst a lot of opinions, photodumps of beautiful places and a tonne of brand collabs. We have each followed scores of people, and somehow they all seem to be leading the good life?

Here’s the best of me

We, too, want this good life. We spend hours thinking of the perfect caption or tweet, over days and plan our posts to the T. We go out with friends we meet thrice a year and make it seem like the brunch of the century, we half-read one article that seems “on-brand”, and put it out like it’s our gospel. We, each, manufacture to different degrees our own brands online, carefully selecting and leaving out things that we don’t want people to think of us, or our lives. We have now proclaimed to the world: this is me, when what we’re really saying is: here’s the best side of me, the one I think is worth showing to the world. How does that really make us feel though?

Ridden with expectations, we want validation on our activities online and if we don’t get it, we feel disappointed, worthless, and let down. All along this broadcast frenzy, we feel like we aren’t ourselves. We feel fake and inauthentic, because our motives are known to us. It seems as though we’re stuck in a cycle that we can’t get out of, and with every passing day, we find ourselves deeper in it. We ask ourselves, ‘is this truly the best the digital world can offer us?’

Being Yourself 101

We put in massive amounts of time and effort to be heard online, to meet new people and to seem hip. We need platforms that are designed so that we can be ourselves. We’re building something like this at Lishash, and use a framework created to bring out the raw sides of people.

Would you do it alone?

Activities we do by ourselves, whether it’s watching a film or reading a book, are things to hold close and dearly. This is a great compass if we are looking for things that we are truly doing for the joy it brings us, rather than for validation. That’s because we do it because we want to; not because of other people, their opinions and wanting to maintain an online rep.

This people-independent nature of music is an important reason we’ve chosen it as the vertical Lishash is based on. Listening to music is an activity we do regardless of who is around; we listen to it when we’re absolutely elated, when we’re desolate and heartbroken, when we’re working, travelling or working out. It’s sometimes an active activity that consumes all our attention, and sometimes it’s literally a background score to our lives and things we do. It’s something that you do to feel emotions in their entirety, or to escape. This is exactly why one of the most powerful features that exists on Lishash is that of listening to music alone with a lot of control, and if you want, you can invite others to join or join others in their listening experience.

___ just joined the party!

Experiences and activities done with others — whether it’s watching a film together or playing games with others, is slowly making it’s way to the mainstream. The way one meets people on Lishash is in a shared experience like this: in music listening sessions. Users meet each other, chat as they listen to the same music, and express in a way that forms a very easy way of bonding. It’s an activity that is already so emotional in nature when done alone, that the same side of us tends to surface when we do it with others. Because of this evocative nature of music, it makes for one of the most organic ice — breakers and ways to get to know people. You don’t have to start with saying something witty, wait for responses because everything is asynchronous, and there’s something you’re already doing, that you can talk about! As these sessions disappear and can’t be consumed later, bringing out a vulnerable side that might not have appeared if others could view messages exchanged at a later time.

No fluff, no show off

What does the youth do to showcase their more real, raw lives online? They make Finsta (Fake Insta) accounts, and document what they can’t on their “real” accounts. Only one’s closest friends follow them on these accounts and they’re made to escape vanity, show off culture and the need to impress.

This culture is why Lishash wants users to have fewer connections, but deeper connections on the app. We intentionally make it difficult for you to become friends with each other. You only meet new folks in listening sessions and have to interact with each other on chat to send a friend request. By adding two layers of difficultly, we ensure that the quality of connections you have > quantity of connections. There is no search where you can look up a person on the app, and once you’re connected, besides listening together, you also stay connected asynchronously by sharing music. However, here, like a lot of social apps, there’s a slippery slope of doing things for the sake of validation and gratification. Lishash is a private network without feeds where sharing happens as threads on songs with select friends. It’s something that doesn’t need you to be loud, rather you need to be express to genuinely convey something, rather than for validation.

When you are on a platform that doesn’t need you to broadcast to everyone on your list, you feel comfortable and at home. You feel like you’re expressing more genuinely, because you feel an inner desire to rather than to gain validation or impress a truckload of people on the internet.

A world with vulnerability

One of the largest problems with building a space with a grand goal like this, is that it is entirely against the status quo. Most people are used to (and addicted to) what current social apps offer — to broadcasting, validation and ingenuity. Getting people to make the shift and break the habit is a definite hurdle.

Another hurdle is creating an environment that makes it easy to be raw. A space like this is almost a prerequisite, a space where I know I won’t be judged, will be respected and treated well. Which is why designing an emotional safehouse is a whole another framework in itself.

If platforms designed themselves in a way that enabled users to be more in the moment, themselves, without having to constantly think about how you are coming off to others, we would truly be completely different. We would be able to be around people without needing to be a cookie-cutter way, and we’d be able to have more real conversations. The next step would be taking these connections offline, and adding a layer to digital relationships that often doesn’t exist.

Amplifying our raw selves was originally published in Lishash on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The open market design

Imagine a bustling physical market, one where there are multiple sellers, all lined up next to each other. There’s a sea of people as far as your eyes can see. You need very little to be a part of this market, whether it’s as someone who is a seller, a buyer or just a window shopper. We can think of current digital platforms as similar to these open physical markets. On these platforms too, anyone with access to the internet can join, and there are close to no barriers to entry.

A thing called overexpression?

Sellers in this market, hawk their wares, each trying to out-shout the other and get the attention of any, and every, passerby. They might be using different rhymes, and quoting different prices, for different things — but they are all selling. When we take the noise of the market to digital platforms, we see it in the form of the abundance of content and opinions that exists. There are so many putting content out, about so many things, that it ends up instilling a deep lack of empathy in us. In the same way that after a while, a passerby won’t feel compelled to react to the sellers pleas, we too don’t feel affected or impacted by content we see.

Compassion fatigue and numbness have become our default states, whether it’s because of people’s daily accounts and inconveniences of life or a barrage of alarming news. We wish we could feel with the same intensity about things happening, people we know (of) and the world around us. However, we find it difficult to acknowledge and empathise with our own problems, let alone someone else’s, oft times because of just how much time and energy we spend on platforms that give a little too much.

Downhill from deep confirmation biases

After a particular point, we keep going to the same merchants and stores in a market, because we get comfortable and complacent. Similarly, the more we express inclinations towards certain people, topics, political and social views, the more information confirming our views we see, further strengthening these views. Algorithms and feeds are personalized to our preferences. This is why digital platforms are considered to be circle jerks that polarize, rather than expose to more, and holistic information.

Once this deep confirmation bias sets in, and we find in-groups, accepting any opinion that challenges or poses a different perspective to the one we hold is absolutely not tolerated. This, along with the benefits that anonymity gives, leads to spirals of comment wars, trolling and bullying that we have all seen at some point.

Empathy & Acceptance: Makings of a Home

When we think of a home, as opposed to a market, there are two major differences: not everyone can enter our home, and there is a sense of safety and warmth that exists at home. These are the two exact things that are also elements of a community. In order to create this space that embodies empathy and acceptance, we need to build boundaries, as well as a space that provides emotional safety. For this, instead of allowing everyone in, we need to have clear definitions of the behaviour, and kind of people that we’d like in the community. Instead of force — fitting empathy and acceptance as after thoughts, we need to make them the tenets of the platform we build.

At Lishash, to bring this grand vision to life, we have designed a couple of small steps using this:

Trait-based access

Our homes are gated; we only allow those we trust in. We either allow those we know in, or maybe a neighbour’s recommended person, or someone that has earned trust. By doing this, we ensure that we are safe and so are our loved ones. If we view a community from this lens too, it can enable us to create similar mechanisms, that help us make spaces like home.

With Lishash, the community we build will have these boundaries:

• People that are empathetic and accepting, especially to others’ taste in music.
• Users who love music, and enjoy discovering new music.

We have successfully built an initial community that exhibits these traits on Lishash which is based out of India. We now want to scale this prototype of a community that we have, and to ensure the tenets we are designing for don’t get compromised we have made Lishash a semi — closed application. Joining is not as easy as having internet access.

To get an invite to the app, whether you are being invited by someone from inside the app or not, you have to go through a form which is the basic gateway into the app. It ensures that you love music — it’s a lengthy form, and you wouldn’t fill it out if you didn’t see the need for a social-music fused experience.

It also gives users an onboarding experience outside the app itself, without having to download it. This ensures that only those truly interested in the app and features join.

This form also inducts the user into the empathetic vibe of the community.

We tell users what our community’s foundations are as statements, and ask them if this is something they’d like. If it’s not we tell them that this may not be the best place for them.

Bringing out the best in people

By creating boundaries on who can enter the app, we take a step to create a space where people feel emotionally safe. Only the folks that want to discover music and understand the tenets of a community can now invite new people — their friends, people they might have met online, people they listen to music with. Even with this limitation, it’s almost impossible to ensure that the vibe we are trying to create gets maintained. Akin to how, if a fairly new person or a stranger enters your home, you still keep some safechecks, we as a community need to do this too, so that the best sides of the users is exhibited on the app.

To address this, we have developed a self-correcting, moderation system using in-app currency called licos (pronounced lie-kos). Every month, a 1000 licos are going to be charged as a subscription fee to continue using the app for free. Behaviour that is oriented towards the community, and isn’t self-serving is rewarded with licos — this includes stuff like hosting sessions that are inclusive, where everyone can participate and everyone’s choice of music can be listened to. It includes sharing music with people in the app, and inviting new users as well.

If someone hosts sessions only with a particular subgenre, without exploring any other genres, community members aren’t going to join their sessions all that often, because they’re people that naturally gravitate towards of exploration of music rather than anchoring. These people won’t earn as many licos and automatically get blocked out of using the app as a new month starts. Our aim is to build a space where the people and the communities that form perpetually uphold these values, and this is one way that we ensure this.

Challenges

One of the largest challenges we can face is exactly what we want to do; scaling a community that replicates the behaviour we exhibit on non — digital platforms, online as well. The problem here, though, what extent is this possible to? Empathetic and accepting behaviour online is just not something we are very used to, and it’s more difficult to instill in online settings as opposed to offline ones. Here, we have semi anonymity, no mutual connections or “real” life repercussions.

Natural habitat for ‘being you’

This builds a space where empathy and acceptance are the tenets on which all social interactions take place. There’s no differentiation in treatment when it comes to digital and non — digital interactions; we treat each other in the same way we would if we were to meet in the physical world.

A habitat where our preferences, choices and likes are respected and celebrated so that we feel comfortable expressing them, rather than having to second guess. Instead of having to walk on eggshells, in the fear of judgement and having to constantly think before saying or doing anything, social structures are designed in a way that paves the path for vulnerability and authenticity.

An environment where we feel a level of comfort and ease, that enables us to really be ourselves, and let all go.

Building an emotional safehouse was originally published in Lishash on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Imagine a world free of stress. A world where you can fully immerse yourself in the present moment, without constantly worrying about the future. A world where you can be completely raw, and express who you truly are without any pretence. A world where you can let all go, and cherish every moment of life to the fullest.

At Lishash, our mission is to make this world a reality. Technology, music and social networks are the tools we have started out with: primarily because of the scale of impact they enable. We don’t want to be limited to a small subset of our society, rather our dream is to deeply affect the life of every single person on our planet. To ensure that this vision remains tractable we have developed a few key frameworks that in isolation enable us to realise a part of the broader vision, and when put together they paint a holistic picture of the future we are building:

Design for Harmony [link]

• The constant battle between virtual and real life simply disappears; both coexist together in harmony. Balance becomes the cornerstone of our lives, and provides a perennial source of fulfilment and satisfaction.
• Keeping you hooked to your digital devices does not make people money, allowing you to experience and fully immerse in all of life’s facets does.

Building an emotional safehouse [link]

• Empathy and acceptance form the foundations of social interactions, whether they are online or offline.
• Everyone gets a chance to be vulnerable, and express who they truly are without any fear of judgement.

Amplifying our raw selves [link]

• Expression is more meaningful than loud, it’s more honest and is driven by a genuine need and desire to do so.
• Rewards aren’t given for expression that’s based on that of others’ as a yardstick, rather for genuity. It hence is a place that builds a sense of serenity and confidence, rather than debilitating self doubt due to constant comparison.
• Engaging with people in easy and organic ways that form fewer, deeper connections rather than several, superficial ones.

Breaking free from the shackles of choice [link]

• We are able to let all go, and enjoy whatever we consume to the fullest, rather than constantly trying to optimise the future.
• Technology improves your life, rather than diminishes it by augmenting real life activities via giving you more control, rather than abundant choice.

The future we are building was originally published in Lishash on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Wanted more? You got it.

There was a time when we wanted more options, more choices, more more more. That time is now here. Whether it’s selecting a film or TV show to watch, or food to order, we have a lot of options. In solving one problem, though, we have created another one. With this humongous number of options, we now face choice overload. This is when the number of choices we have in front of us gets too much, and we are either overwhelmed or paralysed into indecision. This problem manifests itself in many ways in our lives, and here’s how:

The same old s#@t

Whether it’s travel, food, films, games, music, we all have our favourites even though there are many options. This is where humans fall prey to the exploration-exploitation trade off, and we repeatedly choose the same things over and over again. Let’s explore this with music. We try to immaculately collect and sort our most heard tracks in playlists according to genre, activity and feelings. But.. that list is finite and we find ourselves feeling bound by the same selection of music and get sick of this repetition. But we choose to consume the same content because it was convenient; picking something new wasn’t easy. It’s the same when we spend ages on an app but end up ordering the same ol’ Subway order or binge-watching the same ol’ sitcom. We feel like we want more: more discovery, more novelty and only then, we’d come back to our comfortable space — playlists with our favourites.

The feed pill

The solution to this “more” is in the feeds. We are given discovery options using a feed. There’s a feed waiting for us with a bunch of albums, mixes, playlists and recents to choose from. We don’t know what to pick nor do we know how to go about choosing. This abundance of options to choose from leaves us feeling extremely overwhelmed, in different aspects of our lives (food, travel, channel to study from) and it feels like we’re in this loop of fretting, choosing, repeat.

These options are scary especially when we aren’t sure what we want to listen to. Don’t have a genre or track to begin with in mind, and you find yourself in a spiral of scouring through these all-equally-amazing options endlessly. Even though you’re someone who prides yourself in discovery, you find yourself going to the same old playlists over and over.

You vacillate between wanting to try something new, and just quickly settling for something. In an extreme case of choice overload, especially when there’s a ticking clock, you end up crumbling under intensifying pressure, and end up choosing.. nothing.

Looking beyond feeds & AI

We are indeed still headed deep into information and choice overload as we continue consuming content the way we do. We’re constantly thinking about what we are missing out on, worried about the time we’re throwing away — could I have picked a better video to watch or could I have done something more productive while I was on Instagram? Instead of feeling satisfied and enjoying the content that has come up, we’re headed in a spiral that leads to us being less and less mindful with every passing day.

At Lishash, we believe that we need to build a platform where there are no feeds of static content that is dished out solely by algorithms. The following is the framework that we’ve used to build a feed — free platform that’s not AI dependent.

Enter humans

An algorithm knows best — but why? And is that always true? We assume that a machine will know us best, every single time but that is often ignoring an important facet of humans: the desire to be connected to other humans. This is why review systems on any platforms are never going away; we trust the experiences of fellow people. I’m likelier to visit a restaurant that a friend raved about than one that shows up on my Zomato feed because I don’t know what I don’t know about how algorithms rate.

It’s the same when it comes to music: humans seem to be the best places for discovery. If a fellow progressive rock lover were to send me song recommendations, I’d much prefer that than having an algorithm guess what I enjoy. This is why the algorithm on Lishash adds a social layer over what plays by playing songs shared with you by people first. So, say you’ve placed filters on the genre metal, and on the speechiness: instrumental but blocking Dream Theatre, it’ll play songs shared by your friends that match these filters first. Another way to listen to music, with humans, is that you can just hop into a session where they’re already listening to music. A group of humans curate music together for everyone’s listening experience.

Infinite control

YouTube throws up varied content across genres and topics, leaving us more confused with what to pick, and more dissonant after picking. Currently, algorithms give you a wide array of choices to pick from and don’t always help us narrow scopes down, when that is what we need. The need of the hour is to replace infinite choices with infinite control. This means giving the users the reigns of what they want to consume.

What works really well for Lishash in the case of music are advanced filters. Instead of bombarding users with options of playlists, mixes, albums, we give them control to a large degree over what plays. Users can filter any combination of genres, languages, artists, emotions, loudness, speechiness, and almost all important music traits.

Let all go

On the other side of having so much control is the side where you surrender control, and say — I don’t want to choose, I just want an easy way to start the music quick. This is something that Apple Music and Netflix tried out in beta versions, with their infinity buttons, where music or a TV show/movie would just start playing. It didn’t take off because it was at direct war with the other way to start — feeds. However, this means of not having to choose at all becomes an imperative solution to choice overload.

Lishash provides two solutions to “let all go” on the app:

• Starting with vibes. Vibes are where a combination of pre saved filters just start playing. I might listen to extremely loud, speechy music when working out. All I would need to do is press on my workout vibe for these filters to apply.

• Long pressing on a button that automatically plays music that is a mix of algorithmic + friend recommendations. For example, I tend to listen to Indian Classical Fusion in the mornings. If I press this button in the morning, the app will play this genre, shared by friends.

All of this automatically allows us to create a platform whose primary interface is not a list of static content.

What freedom feels like

Currently, lists (in our context, playlists) is what people are used to, attached to even. Choice overload is a latent problem, something that isn’t obviously felt because it’s almost never discussed. Designing an interface that makes the realization of a need explicit, along with making a shift easy is the biggest challenge we face. For instance, to be feed free, we’d have to ensure that there aren’t too many sessions on the home page. This comes at the cost of “engagement” and time spent on the app. To further improve recommendations, several hardware advancements need to be made to get higher bandwidth information about user preferences in real-time.

Real fulfilment stems out of satisfaction, not options. With this feed free design, we can rid ourselves of the feeling that technology has got a grip on us, like we’re puppets and tech the string master. We’d feel like we’re the ones in control, not an algorithm. It would actually give us control, and allow us to be in the moment — whatever we may be doing.

Breaking free from the shackles of choice was originally published in Lishash on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The makings, hearings and thoughts of a singer-songwriter

Just days before Utsavi suggested we host a session that’s almost like a film reel of her life and it’s connection with music, I’d hosted a session called Teenage Reminisce. We queued and played tracks that we listened to a lot in our teenage years, whether it was teen Gen Z music or millennial music. The session was one where people had a lot to queue and say, making it all the more clear how we often associate extremely strong memories with music. That’s why we were so sure that Utsavi’s idea of a Time Travel session would be evocative at the very least, and extremely immersive at the very best.

Utsavi led the listening session — we started with the first song in English she heard and ended with what she’s listening to right now. With this curation, she that took us through the music she was listening to and discovering at different points in her life, as the background tracks of different events that signified Utsavi’s personal growth.

The driving force of the session, that led to as much engagement and interaction between listeners and Utsavi was, without doubt how easily she was vulnerable, speaking of memories, people and thoughts that we are often afraid of understanding ourselves, let alone sharing with people on the internet.

Utsavi’s music is a representation of her emotions, thoughts, self — awareness and introspection. Where she might be in life, what she might be feeling, thinking, processing and understanding about life, love, relationship with others and self is all beautifully culminated and cumulated in the songs she writes.

The session curated by Utsavi was 1hr 40mins long (as opposed to the usual 50–60 min sessions), but we didn’t feel it one bit. Contrarily, it was a session that felt like we were talking to an old friend from school we’d lost touch with, because the memories and feelings she spoke about were so tremendously relatable, and insightful. We went from chit — chatting about travel, to talking about love, heartbreak, dealing with flaws and insecurites and so much more in between.

A realization that resurfaced yesterday was that every person, especially artist, is very actively shaped by music — either in their lives, or their musical careers. If there is anything of originality, it’s these memories, these learnings and the music we associate them with, but we never hear about it. The artist sessions are a phenomenal way to get a peek into someone’s life immersively, effortlessly and with them narrating it, like a friend would at different points in their lives.

Listen to Utsavi’s music here and follow her on Instagram here.

Time Travel with Utsavi Jha was originally published in Lishash on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.