We developed Klarafy, a tool to help listeners find classical music that alignes with their personal tastes. By focusing on what classical music has in common with their own favourite (modern) music, people felt more confident to set their first steps in the world of classical music. Klarafy recommends classical music you might like, by looking at the music you already love. Our tool translates your music taste into classical music by anticipating what you will like. Line up a Spotify playlist with your favourite songs, genre immaterial, and Klarafy then chose classical music that corresponds and explains why you might like the pieces. The result is a web tool that feels as a technological imitation of a music expert who sifts through your collection and bases their recommendations on the real you.
Creative Execution
Please try it yourself on: http://klarafy.klara.be/en Just connect to your Spotify account and choose one of your playlists. Then our tool scans your playlist and translates your music taste into classical music. Klarafy searches affinities, similarities or connections based on 3 criteria: the prevailing music genre in your playlist, the overruling mood and specific topics (vocal types, instruments, specific songs, ...) The easy part was tracking your personal musical taste. Therefore, we scanned your Spotify playlist with existing open source technology. The tricky part was to build an engine that matches your music with corresponding classical music. As this wasn't a matter of beats per minutes or algorithms, we took the machine out of the recommendation and replaced it by the human touch. A team of musicologists and music curators worked for months mapping and categorising thousands of pieces of music to gather meaningful musical connections and surprising insights.
Results
The Klarafy banner on Spotify had a click-trough rate of 6 times the Spotify benchmark.
After the launch, the amount of Spotify users listening to classical music almost doubled:
an increase of 82,6%. Also the genre as such increased by 71,8% on Spotify.
Klarafy reached a younger & broader audience. Before the launch, the average Spotify user who listens to classical music was 53yo. Afterwards, the average age dropped by 10 years.
The average Klara listener: around 56yo, and female. The average Klarafy user is 33yo and 61% of them are men.
140.464 website visits and more than 60.000 Klarafied playlists.
€ 580.000 earned media value. Including: the national tv news, the major radio stations and our most popular talk show. Belgium's most popular radio station, Radio2, offered Klarafy a weekly item.
Due to the succes, Klara is developing a educational tour for schools based on our tool.
The biggest barrier for a classical radio station is their core product itself: classical music. Because most people simply have lost the connection to this rich, cultural heritage. That's a pity, as almost all music we know today is rooted in classical music. That's why we focused on what their own favourite (modern) music has in common with classical music.
Our goal: give people without any knowledge about classical music a starting point. Our insight: "we don't know which classical music you might like. But we do know which music you already love." We choose to focus on Spotify users: they already love music and via Spotify's gigantic database, they could hear the recommend pieces immediately. Our banners had a catchy call-to-action "Translate your favourite music into classical music" and achieved a click-throughg rate 6 times higher than the Spotify benchmark. By using the music people were familiar with, Klarafy lowered the threshold for classical music. Furthermore, we felt the "why" was absolutely crucial. So every recommended composition came with a clear explanation on the connection to their own music. As opposed to existing recommendation tools (that give you more of the same), Klarafy helps you to break out of the ‘filter bubble’ and lets you discover new music.