Max Engel: a Blog

I’m always wary of an acquisition where the new parent insists that they’re going to let the acquired company remain separate and autonomous. It seems to indicate that the purchase was a defensive maneuver.

While certainly an understandable position to be in, I do wonder the long-term strategy for integrating Tumblr into Yahoo!. There are certainly opportunities around native advertising and providing reach for the network and a preferred means of content creation. However, I hope this ends better than the Flickr story.

Honestly, the last time Yahoo! bought a social platform for self expression it was Geocities, and we all know how that ended…

Apr 17

Pandora’s Biggest Weakness, Potential Opportunity

From a discovery standpoint, Pandora is built upon the concept of reinforcing existing taste and presenting a variation on a theme. In practice, this means that a listener is exposed to music they’ll like, but not necessarily new music. Pandora could add a means by which it scans a users music library to determine existing artists already in their collection. Then, truly “new” discovery could occur, and a listener could stumble across new bands and purchase new music.

Additionally, Pandora is inherently a passive music experience, and so there is little engagement with the product outside of the minimal amount of interaction necessary when listening to a station. While they’ve dabbled with social elements through the website, it would be interesting for them to focus on other threads of music discovery. For example, Bandsintown lets me link my taste profile to Pandora to help me explore local concerts. I think Pandora should more deeply explore ways to bridge offline and online music experiences.

Finally, Pandora should explore the ways in which they could act as an intermediary platform to connect labels and artists with listeners. For example, Pandora is sitting on a trove of valuable analytics that get generated as a byproduct of user interaction. This data could be immensely valuable if packaged correctly, and the music industry would be willing to pay for access to a service that would help them better understand their consumers. Similarly, there has been a great deal of activity in the direct-to-consumer music marketing space, and Pandora could also explore how they could offer better services in this area to allow a band to better engage with their fans.

I’m participating in a virtual roundtable series on sidewinder.fm about Pandora. Here is my response to the first question.

Feb 25

Here is a guest post I wrote for sidewinder.fm about the major trends shaping the development of web products in 2013.

Jan 25

Jan 03

Here a post I wrote on my other blog about why I’m supporting the new GameStick console on Kickstarter.

Nov 13

Oct 08

Speaking at the SF MusicTech Summit

I’ll be moderating a panel on “Building Great Products” at this event tomorrow. You can find the schedule here.

Aug 20

My Latest Move

Short version: I’ve left the BBC and am now working for Buzzmedia where I’m leading up product development for SPIN Magazine. If you want the long version dotted with personal anecdotes and rambling thoughts and theories, read on.

Long version: Growing up, I had a wall in my bedroom where I mounted all of the ticket stubs from every show I ever went to. It was a sun-faded story of the development of my music taste, and when my parents moved out of that house, we had the wall removed to save that bit of personal history.

Music is something that is both deeply personal and highly exhibitionist. I remember the joy of making mixtapes each summer before I went away to camp, working to craft the perfect expressions of my individual taste to share with and show off to my friends. However, I also remember the first time I was angry to find out that someone I knew was into a hidden gem of a band that I liked, because I felt that they had violated my sense of identity. This is the complex duality of music: it is both the secret embrace we listen to when hidden in our rooms and the self-empowered declaration of identity we blare from our cars.

I was lucky enough to grow up during a time when music was irreversably transformed. My own museum of audio technology is littered with cassettes (including the Pocket Rocker), CD’s, vinyl, minidiscs, and a bevy of MP3 players. I remember finding music on Hotline, FTP’s, Napster, and the barrage of P2P services that bursted during my college years.

Now, as someone who has found myself working in technology, I’m always looking for ways to blend my passions with my occupations. Most recently it brought me to the BBC, where I was lucky enough to work with an amazing team of people building games for shows I love, properties like Doctor Who and Top Gear. However, an opportunity recently came up that I couldn’t pass over.

I’ve joined Buzzmedia to handle product development for the recently-acquired SPIN Magazine, and it is a real honor to work with a brand I’ve admired for a long time. While the music industry is certainly experiencing an unprecedented amount of volatility, the opportunity to work with such a storied publication and be a part of the process of reshaping the discussion, discovery, and consumption of music was something I couldn’t let pass me by.

So yet again, here I am writing another entry explaining my next career move. I certainly have made a lot of job switches over the past six years, and I think I’ve found an industry that is moving as fast as I like to.