REALM - Music Collaboration

Hey! I purchased a one month membership and cancelled it immediately after, specifically to avoid a recurring charge. Despite that, I was charged again on a recurring basis. I cancelled a second time and could not find any phone number or email for customer support anywhere in the app, and nobody reached out to me. The app also feels early stage. Share and navigation buttons often do not work, and moving between sections is laggy, frequently requiring more than one tap. The appears to be very low engagement as well. There appears to be fairness issues here also. A large portion of the music is AI generated, including entries in cash prize contests, other contests, and contests are decided by community vote in some instances. When there are many users who already know each other they can vote each other into winning positions despite the criteria for winning. The app is also gamified with level bars and daily login rewards designed to keep users posting and returning. Research on skill development consistently shows that structured feedback-rich deliberate practice that is ideally guided by more skilled others drives real improvement. This does not include casual daily app engagement. On top of that, the user base here is small, and discovery driven fan growth strategy research shows that larger platforms function as top of funnel discovery engines that feed into an artist’s own owned channel like an email list or personal site. A small platform limits how much real discovery is even possible, regardless of how much time you put in. I am not saying it’s the worse because I haven’t seen all of the apps for artists, but this one has a low of areas of growth.

Leaderboards are my kryptonite, and oh boy does REALM have a good one 💥🎤🎶🎧