Building Sollos: Content Strategy
4 min read
Content Strategy, Music Licensing, Product Infrastructure, Audio Technology, Venture Building, Sollos
For Sollos, content wasn’t decoration or marketing. It was infrastructure, and getting it wrong would have broken the product.
Does content underpin your product experience?
One of the least visible but most critical parts of building Sollos was content. Not marketing content, but the audio itself.
The quality of that content defined the user experience far more than the interface or feature set. If the music didn’t work, nothing else mattered.
We set ambitious goals for launch. We needed instrumental tracks that matched specific need states, worked across a range of genres, and were clean enough to carry our frequency work without distortion or interference.
There were no shortcuts. Most wellness products rely on royalty-free or made-to-brief tracks. That wasn’t an option here. We needed real music from real artists, with enough space in the arrangement for the signal, and with the understanding that anything we added had to be sympathetic to the original recording.
We combed the UMG catalogue using enhanced metadata, filtering by tempo, tone, emotional profile, and harmonic structure. Even then, identifying viable tracks was only the start.
To test tone placement and alignment properly, we built a lightweight internal tool, effectively our own simplified DAW, to experiment with different approaches before committing anything to production. This allowed us to work quickly while protecting audio quality and artistic intent.
Licensing and clearance added another layer of complexity. Best-in-class audio quality was non-negotiable, and every track needed to be properly cleared. Progress was steady, but slow. At times, painfully so. The list of sourced, mixed, and approved tracks grew incrementally over months.
The content team carried a huge amount of pressure during this phase. Everyone understood that if this part failed, the rest of the product would fail with it. Of all the workstreams on Sollos, content was by far the hardest to get right.
It’s also the one that’s most often underestimated.
If content is central to your product, it isn’t something to figure out at the end. It needs the same level of attention, investment, and rigour as the technology that sits around it.