#StartupsEverywhere Profile Rolf Locher, President & Co-Founder, Cranberry Queues
This profile is part of #StartupsEverywhere, an ongoing series highlighting startup leaders in ecosystems across the country. This interview has been edited for length, content, and clarity.
Revolutionizing the Concept of Geo-Located Music
Cranberry Queues is a digital music service company that is aiming to revolutionize the way music is shared and discovered through their proprietary music sharing platform. President and Co-Founder Rolf Locher told us about what led him to Cranberry Queues, the challenges he’s faced in building a technology startup, and how he’s navigating the complexities of things like privacy and content moderation given the platform’s unique features.
Tell us about your background. What led you to Cranberry Queues?
We conceived the idea for Cranberry Queues in a small dorm room, while my co-founders and I were juniors at Villanova University and I was pursuing my degree in Computer Engineering. We were all taking a class where we were tasked with a design project intended to last a year. Given the nature of the assignment, our team was assembled before we knew what we would be building. Based on our positioning in the Villanova social scene and college life, we thought people at parties needed better ways to suggest music, and there were no established channels for sharing music recommendations through popular music streaming services such as Apple Music in real time.The concept of Cranberry Queues is simple: geo-located music playlists. As you walk around, music changes based on what is being played nearby. It functions much like radio, but with crowdsourced DJs.
What is the work you are doing at Cranberry Queues?
We aim to provide new channels for empowering artists, DJs, and listeners as the world's first in-product jukebox. The experience is built around live collaborative playlists that are geo-located on a map of the world. Any user can create a playlist and invite their friends nearby or open it up to the public. Members of these queues have a wide range of capabilities. They can suggest their own music, vote to reorder the playlists, or listen along in real time. Musicians never intended to play for just one person, but music has become an isolated experience after the creation of smartphones and headphones. Cranberry Queues is driven by the purpose of turning music back into a social experience.
Cranberry Queues relies on a number of services for its critical functions such as streaming music and geolocation. Can you talk about which services you use, and how you managed to build your platform on top of them?
We absolutely would not have been able to launch Cranberry Queues without integrating with another music or location provider. Cranberry Queues is built on top of Apple Music and Spotify, whose libraries of songs already number in the millions. It’s an incredible feat to be able to digitally store all of those songs, let alone buy and license them given the extensive regulation surrounding their use. There are differences when it comes to integrating with existing services, though. For example, it has been easier for us to integrate with Apple Music compared to Spotify. The codebase we are using to build is Swift, which is Apple's native language. And while users can stream instantly on Apple Music after signing in, they must have Spotify open simultaneously, which is a large development and interface concern for us.
For maps in Cranberry Queues, we use Google Maps. Our location features would not match Google Maps in scale or complexity if we had to build them ourselves. Most of the information needed is publicly available, but there's an extensive amount of technology involved. The entire infrastructure is incredibly hard to reproduce; it’d be like reinventing the wheel.
Does the ability to access location data implicate privacy concerns for you? If so, how have you navigated that issue as you developed your app?
Privacy issues do pose a significant concern for us. Location is intimately tied with our user story, so we've taken great care not to link location with anybody offline. The agreement is that as long as the information stays on the device while the user is active on the app/device, there is no breach of privacy. For context, when you make a playlist public, you drop a pin on the map that is tied to location and is available for everybody to see. There were privacy concerns on the visibility of location, particularly with children who live in rural or isolated areas sharing their playlists to the public. To navigate this issue, we’ve added new options, such as private queues, to monitor the availability and exclusivity of public playlists.
In the app, we noticed that when inputting a title, a pop-up said it was checking for profanity when creating playlist titles. In addition to the playlist titles, do you moderate user messages? How do you think about moderation at Cranberry Queues, and does the current intermediary liability framework work well for you?
Since checking for profanity is an expensive operation, we have yet to build a cohesive solution for content moderation. Our chat is not moderated right now, which is absolutely a concern. The App Store also requires any app that has profiles or users like we do to have the ability to report other users. We have implemented a user-side solution that allows them to report profanity themselves, but we are working to find solutions from our end to address both issues. To ensure that everyone is respected within our chat, we would need direct moderation that would require a greater number of staff on our part. Having staff screening for names and chats for profanity is easier and more effective than a software or program we install. If we were responsible for every message our users sent, I wouldn't feel comfortable using our chat until we have more staff and implemented a moderation system. This resource-intensive system could be a burden on smaller startups like us.
What are your goals for Cranberry Queues moving forward?
We envision Cranberry Queues becoming a global application able to explore music worldwide according to each unique neighborhood. Being able to look at Cuba, for example, and see what they're looking at and listening to at that moment, is a whole new experience. We also see Cranberry Queues at the center of a really interesting content curation ecosystem that will empower DJs worldwide. Many DJs we’ve talked to, including those at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, are really excited about having new channels for getting paid and new methods to organize their daily activities. Though our user base is still small currently, it is well distributed around the world, and we strongly believe Cranberry Queues has the potential to become an international phenomenon.
All of the information in this profile was accurate at the date and time of publication.
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