Today’s interview is with Jeff Yasuda, the CEO and co-founder of Feed.fm (Music as a Service), which helps game developers, content publishers, and e-commerce retailers increase customer engagement, retention, and conversions by incorporating popular music into their environments– at the lowest possible cost. Jeff joins me today stop talk about Feed.fm, the impact of music on customer experience and what others can learn from their experience.

This interview follows on from my recent interview – Taziki’s is closing the disability employment gap and enriching their customer and employee experience at the same time – Interview with Dan Simpson – and is number 316 in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders that are doing great things, providing valuable insights, helping businesses innovate and delivering great service and experience to both their customers and their employees.

Here’s the highlights of my chat with Jeff:

• Life is too short to work with people that you don’t like. And, life is too short not to pursue what you really love doing.
• Feed FM provides music as a service.
• They handle all of the effort associated associated with licensing and curation of music and also make it easy for their customers to integrate music into their app or website or social media etc.
• They help brands enhance and differentiate the experience that customers get with audio and music.
• Audio is potentially an overlooked dimension of the customer experience.
• The fitness market is a core segment for them.
• Music makes the experience more enjoyable.
• They work with brands like Fitbit, Asics and hot startups like Tonal and Mirror.
• Scientific research shows that the right sort of music enhances the right type of activity or situation.
• It also impacts things such as average session time, retention and lifetime value (LTV).
• There are all sorts of different applications for how you could use music to enhance the customer experience.
• Imagine you called a call centre and while you are waiting on the phone you are given a choice of music.
• MasterCard has started to develop an audio brand (sonic branding).
• If you are going to start to use music as part of your experience then the first thing you have to realise is that you need to compensate the rights holders.
• Jeff’s Punk CX word: personalization.

About Jeff

Jeff Yasuda is the CEO and Founder of Feed.fm (Feed Media Inc.). Feed.fm helps game developers, content publishers, and e-commerce retailers increase customer engagement, retention, and conversions by incorporating popular music into their environments– at the lowest possible cost. These engagement metric improvements in turn improve financial metrics– including increased ARPU (average revenue per user), reduced average CAC (customer acquisition cost), and lower churn.

Their plug-and-play music and media solutions have helped clients double their app user retention rates and drive 2x visit-to-purchase conversion increases. Current customers include Fitbit, ASICS, DailyBurn, American Eagle Outfitters, Charlotte Russe, Nautilus, and Shazam.

Feed.fm was founded by the team that created Blip.fm and includes Chairman Mika Salmi, former President of Viacom/MTV. The company’s investors include Crunchfund, KEC Ventures, FyrFly Ventures, Core Ventures, Streamlined Ventures, and entrepreneurs from gaming, media, and technology backgrounds.

Music has always been an important part of Jeff’s life and he considers himself a bona fide hack on guitar. Prior to Blip.fm, Jeff has worked with numerous technology companies in software, hardware, computer services, semiconductor services and telecommunications equipment companies. Most recently, Jeff was Managing Director and CFO of Redwood Ventures where he managed investments in their technology portfolio. Prior to that he worked in Investment Banking at Lehman Brothers, and did strategic consulting, M&A and financial valuation at Arthur Andersen. Jeff is a CPA, has an MBA from New York University, and a BA from Dartmouth College. He is also a co-founding director for Little Kids Rock, a non-profit helping to teach music to children in our public schools.

Check out Feed.fm, say Hi to Jeff and the folks at Feed.fm on Twitter @jeffyasuda and @feedfm and do connect with Jeff on LinkedIn here.

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Thanks to Pixabay for helping me source the image. The Photo was taken by Gavin Whitner.