Thursday, September 19, 2019
Interview with Zack Zalon, Super Hi-Fi
In an era, where every single streaming music service seems to be the same thing—indistinguishable from each other—how do they differentiate and create customer loyalty? Los Angeles-based Super Hi-Fi (www.superhifi.com) has created what co-founder and CEO Zack Zalon says is an artificial intelligence driven service which brings a sense of personalization and connection to those services, to help them retain and attract customers. We spoke with Zach about the company and its technology.
What is Super Hi-Fi?
Zack Zalon: Super Hi-Fi is a platform to help music experience companies, like digital music services, to deliver much more compelling, much higher quality music experiences to their audiences. My business partner and I working together for about 20 years, and we actually met at a short-lived startup Jimmy Iovine created in the 90's called Farmclub.com. While we were there we ended up in a conversation over drinks one night, over the vision of where digital music was going. Even though, at the time, it was so early and nascent, we thought there were so many incredible opportunities to take the best of radio and combine that with all the personality and personalization elements, and apply those to new digital formats. We realized, at that time, that's what we wanted to do for a living. We had precisely the same vision and epiphany on what we wanted to do. So, we've ended up doing that for the past 20 years.
Soon thereafter, I started a division for Richard Branson and Virgin, and ran all of Virgin's digital music platforms globally for seven and a half years, while we were still in the era of megastores. When those megastores started closing, I saw the writing on the wall, and handed Branson back his keys, and set up a digital agency to do for other companies, what we had been doing for Branson. We ended up building a lot of digital music platforms. We build the back end platform for CBS Radio, for both terrestrial and online, and brought AOL Radio to market, and launched, back when those brands really mattered. We built something called Muve Music, which I'm really proud of. Cricket Wireless had us design, develop, and operate that platform, which was one of the first subscription music services built into your home. It was specifically for lower income consumers, which I am proud of. We had 3.5 million paying customers when Cricket sold to AT&T. So, I've been passionately dedicated to digital music for a long time.
It sounds like you ended up doing a lot more than music servicse as a digital agency?
Zack Zalon: As we needed to grow our digital agency, we started to expand into all sorts of digital fields. We did sports for Madison Square Garden, for the Kicks and Rangers; we did consumer finance for Experian and for Citibank; we built sites for Johnson and Johnson, including the number one diabetes app. We also ended up building consumer apps for National Geographic, which was really great. Through all of that, what we learned, as we were growing our agency and developing those platforms for multinational consumer brands, is realizing those brands really know how to connect with their customer base. They understand their customers, and know how to build incredible, deeply emotional relationships with them. There are techniques that allow you to be able to do that. Wha we realized, when we looked at digital music, which is our passion, is that the music service providers of today don't have that. They just don't deploy those techniques. They just play song after song after song with giant gaps between songs. There's no brand messaging, there's no connective tissue or emotional experience that consumers are clamoring for and want to experience in digital music. We wanted to do something about that. That's why we started Super Hi-Fi.
So what does this look like?
Zack Zalon: If you look at National Geographic or Johnson and Johnson, what you find, which makes them strong, is that they stand for something. They have values that they lead with, and they focus on what's different about themselves. What you stand for, and what makes you different, is what you are known for by your customer base. When you look at digital music, it's tough to see what makes any of them different. They are effectively all the same. It's the same music, same quality, and all available on the same platforms, and they all essentially cost the same. In that kind of world, we think they are either going to become commodities, or they will step up and realize that you have to do more than just play song after song after song to move the needle. They are going to need to have unique, exclusive content between songs. They have to have personalization and branding, and have to have exclusive content, like interviews, points of view, or podcasts. It has to be something unique from the content standpoint, rather than just a playlist. That's why we set up Super Hi-Fi and its technology, to help companies manage that. It takes a lot of technology to do that. However, since we had the great resources of a big digital agency to do that, we had a lot of resources at our disposal to solve this challenge. We have ended up with what is the most powerful AI ever created for understanding music and music related content, with the same depth as a trained DJ's ear. What that allows us to do, is for our technology to make production decisions in real time, which sound incredible, and allow our customers to deliver and amazing listening experience to their listeners.
So what do they hear, what do they see?
Zack Zalon: The first thing, is it just sounds better than other services. If you play a song on those services, you'll notice there's a give second gap of silence, the songs play at different volume, and there's nothing but dead air between tracks. Our goal is to fill that dead air, and we started by training our AI to make sure those songs transition smoothly between each other, and play at the same volume level. That's the first piece, which we've deployed with partners already. The second piece, is actually injecting content between songs. It's fully produced, but it's all happening on real time on your system. That might be adding news, or sports, or unique podcasts, or it could just be branding so you know who you're listening to. That's becoming a lot more important as music listening gravitates to smart speakers and things like Amazon Alexa. If you don't have a digital interface with your logo on the screen, how do you know if you're listening to Spotify, or Apple,or Pandora, orAmazon? That's the kind of branding and unique content experience we're trying to help provide, so that consumers have a sense of place where they are.
How did you decide to focus on this product, versus the digital agency business?
Zack Zalon: We love digital music, and it's been our vision and passion for 20 years working together. This is something we've always wanted to do. In a way, we had started the agency focused exclusively on digital music and products, but then you start getting calls from all these other companies and we almost couldn't help ourselves. It's been rewarding building consumer apps for such respected brands like National Geographic. However, we grew, despite our passion,no because of it. Our passion is digital music. Having run a business for Virgin for quite a number of years, is I've learned that when we lean in, and we grow, it's because of our passions, and not despite them. When we first started developing this technology, well over three years ago, we started developing the technology by meeting with every digital music service out there, and proselytizing what they needed to do to transform and differentiate from each other. But, after a year, nobody had signed up. Everyone was excited about the idea, but no one signed up. There was a point where we considered throwing in the towel and going back to building a digital agency. However, we believe, utterly and completely, that digital music services are going to become like what we're talking about. We decided to get out and evangelize that vision, redouble our efforts for Super Hi-Fi, and didn't just throw in the towel. Instead, we went out into the market and found people who shared our vision, and who wanted to bring this to life.
Finally, what's next for you?
Zack Zalon: We're going to continue to push the accelerator down. When our partners are successful, our company is successful. When we are successful in getting people to listen for longer periods, our customers are successful. When our partners have products where the quality has improved, where their listener base enjoys the experience more, we're successful. Our entire focus is on making and delivering the best possible product experience we can, and our belief is if we continue to improve our product, that will take care of itself.
Thanks!