Spotify Connections
Timeline: June 2016 – Present
Project Type: Personal Project
Role: UX Researcher / UX Designer
Tools: Adobe Illustrator, Adobe XD, Adobe AfterEffects, Adobe PhotoShop, SurveyMonkey
Skills: User Research, User Interviews, Journey mapping, Sketching, Wireframing, Screen Flows, Visual Design, Interaction Design, Product Benchmarking, User Personas, AEIOU method, Hook framework, Jobs-to-be-Done Framework
Spotify Connections is a concept for a social feature that focuses on community building and learning for artists and creators. Additionally, a new experimental section for artists to post new tracks, remixes, and sets will allow listeners to find their favorite experimental songs as well as allow artists to have a creative sandbox. I worked on this project independently as a personal UX study and a dive into my interests in music.
Problem
Today, music streaming services have taken storm as being one of the biggest drivers for revenue in the music industry. Listeners have the options to listen to the songs they want to hear on-demand and wherever they go without the need to buy from specific albums or artists. With a plethora of options for on-demand streaming, listeners seem to flock toward Spotify and Apple Music for their music needs. In this study, I hope to investigate the current mobile audio streaming landscape, and how might we improve the audio streaming to be more accessible for creators and listeners.
Building Context with Research
What does the current audio streaming experience look like?
I wanted to get a better idea of how users went about discovering new music, sharing music, and interacting with music during their daily life. To get a better understanding of who are users are, their behaviors, and motivations, I used these research techniques.
Method #1: Reviews of consumer reports and Quantitative Data
Examining global reports helped give me an additional perspective of the current landscape of the music industry, audio streaming, and state of current applications. Benchmarking focused on uncovering pain points and areas of improvement in the existing music applications. Survey data assisted with finding more information such as device usage, app usage, and a benchmark of user methods for music management.
Method #2: Qualitative Data
By performing in-person interviews and task analysis, I aimed to uncover user behaviors for discovery, music creation, music sharing, and music management. Additionally, this helped shape the different users and stakeholders that may be present in a user’s journey.
Consumer Reports
- In 2018, the Interational Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) reported that music industry revenue was composed of 25% physical sales, 12% digital (excluding streaming), 47% streaming, 2% synchronization, and 14% performance rights.
- Primarily driven by fan engagement with streaming services, IFPI reports that the music industry grew 9.7% in revenue with paid subscription audio increasing by 34% with 255 million of users of paid accounts globally.
- IFPI reported that revenue from physical sources had declined by 10.1% in 2018.
- Soundcloud boasts over 200 million songs available, while Spotify and Apple Music have around 50 million in their music catalog.
Survey Findings (SurveyMonkey)
A response of the various questions asked from the survey is shared here with a sample size of 62. Items with the highest opportunity are highlighted in orange.
Key Takeaways:
- Audio streaming is the standard platform for users to access music.
- Artists use audio streaming as a quick way to gain notability.
- Artists often have an account on Spotify for official releases while accounts on Soundcloud are used for experimental outlet.
By looking deeper at the needs of artists and listeners, we can find the features that bring value and fulfill the jobs that each of these groups hope to do.
User Interviews & Defining the PoV
What is the PoV of the potential users?
To look for opportunities for improvement, I interviewed young music listeners, amateur music artists, and DJs about their music listening habits, methods for discovering new music, their social interactions through music, and their music creating experience if they were an artist.
Key Takeaways:
- Listeners use at least 2 music streaming applications for different purposes.
- Listeners use Apple Music/Spotify/YouTube because of it’s trustworthy and large music catalog that spans across many genres.
- Listeners use Soundcloud for access to underground music, DJ remixes that use copyrighted music, or live music recordings that would not be available on Spotify/Apple Music.
- Artists often post their new tracks and remixes on Soundcloud before any other platform.
- Current audio streaming platforms lack a compelling way to actively request music suggestions from others.
- Listeners often find music from their social network or people that they follow, but don’t often re-post music themselves.
Although the cost of membership and benefits are about the same between the two, most people subscribe to Spotify Premium over SoundCloud Go. So why is there such a disparity for paid users between the two streaming services?
Comparison of Spotify and Soundcloud Free/Paid Services
From my interviews, it seems that listeners believe that they get more value out of paying for Spotify rather than SoundCloud. I discovered three potential causes for the subscription disparity:
- Spotify Free restricts on-demand listening on mobile while SoundCloud allows mobile listening with ads.
- Spotify Free’s longer ads are more of an interruptive burden for users than SoundCloud Free’s short ads between songs.
- The music that listeners are looking for on SoundCloud (live DJ sets, underground hip hop, remixes) are not barred behind the subscription paywall while Spotify Free restricts free selection of music.
The few people that I talked to that actually perceived value for SoundCloud were artists. SoundCloud has a subscription service separate for artists that allowed them to post their own tracks and track analytics. Unless they were an artist, most casual listeners seemed to not value SoundCloud’s subscription services as much as Spotify Premium.
Key Idea:
“Most listeners use Spotify/Apple Music for streaming most mainstream genres and popular songs while they view Soundcloud as a platform for DJs, mixes, and up-and-coming artists.”
Comparing Spotify to SoundCloud’s subscription numbers was like comparing green apples to oranges since they served entirely different populations. SoundCloud’s subscription numbers is directly affected by their subscription model and more so than the usability of their site. So I decided to pivot the project and reframe the question to aim to not only improve usability, but also achieve a business goal in the framework of Spotify.
PoV & How-might-we:
“How might we make Spotify more accessible to audiences that utilize Soundcloud for the creative and experimental platform?”
User Personas
From our interviews, I created two personas that represented the listeners and artists that primarily use the audio streaming landscape.
Journey Mapping
To pinpoint opportunities that can be leveraged by Spotify, we can look at the interfaces of multiple streaming applications and how they are used to get a better understanding of our users, their needs and their journey!
In addition to the user interviews, I asked the interviewees to actively work out tasks such as:
- Accessing music at home, on-the-go, or wherever they actively listen to music (doing chores, working out at the gym)
- Sharing music with others
- Finding new music in genres of their choice or something different altogether
For the music producers, I asked them to:
- Post a track on the streaming service they use to distribute
- Find music or samples to use in their music composition
- Advertise their music
Based on the user interviews, surveys, and tasks, I organized my thoughts into a journey map for the listener and the artist, breaking down the activities, thoughts during these activities, and feelings throughout the audio streaming process. This helped me expose pain points and identify opportunities for improvement for users.
Big Idea:
Spotify lacks a compelling platform for artists to use as an creative sandbox and a connection to their listeners.
Key Takeaways:
- Artists/creators are often looking to start a conversation about music while casual listeners focus more on personal exploration.
- Most artists find the most support from other artists sharing their music or giving feedback.
- Being unable to find a tune or sound that fits their mood is a frustrating experience for listeners/creators.
- Listeners often are looking for music that fits their mood and use a variety of tools to get there such as curated playlists, friend suggestions, and related track suggestions.
- Artists use a variety of social platforms to advertise their music, hoping to grow their fan base.
- Listeners dislike seeing songs they’ve seen or heard before when looking for new music.
Initial Concepts and Wireframes
Based on the feedback from the exploration phase, I ideated several proposals that could potentially make Spotify more accessible to the audiences that want a creative and experimental platform. The main creative platform currently on the market for music, Soundcloud, focuses on providing a testing platform for creators to distribute music while giving listeners a social platform to listen and share music.
Spotify focuses on providing a seamless music listening experience with it’s social aspects limited to sharing songs externally. The social features are often overlooked by users and hidden in their mobile applications. There is room to target these features a bit more by focusing on the artists while giving creators a reason to use Spotify as a creator’s platform.
Here are a few proposals:
- A new sandbox section for artists to post their experimental music and for listeners to explore new songs. This aims to give artists freedom to post any music they’d like while setting users expectations that the music they here would not always be the same quality as the curated music available on Spotify.
- Connect with other artists to start discussion about music and learn from each other. This aims to build a community for artists to share, learn, and empower each other.
- A new social page for artists to interact and share with listeners.
User Feedback
I presented my initial ideas to the same set of listeners and artists I had interviewed in hopes of clarifying features that was the most compelling changes.
Both listeners and artists were very receptive to the idea of being able to see remixes, edits, live sets, and work-in-progress music. Listeners were initially concerned that Spotify would lose it’s appeal if the quality of music was not upheld. However, when setting the expectation that the music might be a work-in-progress, users were willing to be more understanding that the music is unpolished and happy to find their favorite remixes and sets. When exploring the experimental tab, some users quipped that “SoundCloud’s edge is that you can get a favorable following through the number of likes, reposts, and shares, which helps artists gain a following.” It seems that these numbers were important indicators for them when sorting through the sea of music, especially for experimental music.
Listeners mentioned that they usually start the application and just play music when they’re on-the-go so they would not really use any commenting features or chatroom features. “I don’t really share music actively, so using a chatroom would not be that interesting to me.” This led me to think that commenting/chats might not be the best way for fan engagement.
This got me thinking more about how I might be able to continue building a framework for artists to connect with each other.
Other details:
- Chatrooms let artists hare/request samples, synth presets, techniques, or plugins that they have used.
- Let artists post tags for the music to identify niche genres (“psychedelic R&B,” “Riddim,” “emo rap”) or artist intent (“WIP,” “Collab seeker,” “advice needed”).
- Add an indicator that experimental section means WIP music or songs that are otherwise not as polished.
- Add a tracker for plays, likes, followers to signify credibility of a song. The higher the numbers, the more recognition artists will have to leverage when getting gigs at shows.
Mid-fidelity Prototypes
To further test the ideas, I created an interactive mid-fidelity prototype that incorporated the feedback from the initial concepts and fleshed out the solutions into Spotify’s existing mobile platform. I hoped to better understand how users would navigate and use the new features.
Further User Feedback and Reception
I presented my mid-fidelity prototypes to the same set of artists and listeners from my initial exploration phase.
The artists were receptive to the Connections feature as they valued having a way to communicate with other artists actively. These users found a sense of community and satisfaction when seeing and engaging with other artists for growth and understanding. One artist mentioned that they joined a Facebook group for DJs and says “these communities are often inspiring when talking to these people because you get to see the progression of each artist.” The conversations range from music, production, and tips about “how to get a first gig” or “how to start DJing.”
Another artist expressed their concern about group chats and it is easy to lose track of topics. Late responders of texts might not feel as engaged to respond if the topic has already changed in the group chat. They mentioned a “reply to specific chat” feature might be valuable to help ensure clear responses to each other.
One artist quipped about having a schedule for chats. They explained that their experience with Discord, a group voice chat application, was nice because people would consistently enter the chat at a specific time of day, which allowed for more engaging discussion rather than sporadic texts throughout the day. “I think people are curious to see what’s going on when they see people online in the voice chat.”
Listeners and artists were very receptive to the experimental sandbox as it opened up music options they did not have before on Spotify.
Other details that contribute to the experience of a creator’s platform:
- “Find Others” tab should be changed to a more descriptive title that indicates getting feedback or engagement from artists specifically
- Budding artists are often looking for relevant advice on how to get their first gig or label, looking to promote themselves further, and creating music. This should be reflected in the “Find Others” activities.
- Seeing the number of likes is just as important as seeing the number of plays to gauge music for listeners. Just because a song will play (on a playlist perhaps) does not mean the listener will enjoy it so it is important to distinguish the two.
- The “Behind the Sound” feature gives a sense that you are interacting with the artist and an idea of the work that goes into a track. It gives artists a way to show the work and process behind one of their tracks. It could lead to a connection for artists and listeners alike.
High-fidelity Prototypes
For the final concept application, I took the feedback from the mid-fidelity prototype and fleshed out some of the details that are presented. The high-fidelity prototype aims to better understand the nuances of the user and how to optimize behavior. Additionally, I stylized the layout using Spotify’s branding. The Experimental section and Connections tab acts as a medium for creators to learn from each other and test out new music.
Below walks through the experimental section layout and a use case of how an artist would find and connect with other artists to discuss music.
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- Find work-in-progress tracks in the new experimental section
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- Share and learn with a new Behind the Sound card for artists to post about their music making process unique to each song.
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- Access the experimental playlists by clicking on the Experimental playlist on the Home page
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- Experimental playlists list the track name, original artist, editing artist, and the number of plays
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- Experimental songs describes the verb that the editing artist uses to create the song.
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- Engage with the artist community through the new connections tab
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- Actively find other artists to collaborate, discuss, and educate
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- Click on List Yourself in the Find Feedback tab to allow others to find and engage with you
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- Enter information details about yourself so others with the same interest can find you.
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- Look at other artists’ profiles to see their needs and click connect to request a chat with them
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- Filter through artist listings to better fit why you’re looking to engage with other artists
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- Chatrooms tab displays that shows chats that users have participated in.
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- Chatrooms allow users to message connections, share track files, and reply to messages.
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- The Artists tab shows a list of artist connections that have mutually connected with you.
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- The chatroom profile shows list of artists in the current chatroom
Reception & Next Steps
The concept overall was well received. Although listeners did not have access to the Connections tab, they enjoyed the idea of being able to find more WIP music without having to jump between applications. However, there was still concern of wasting time sifting through a lot of music before finding new music that fit the user’s mood. This could be addressed using a good tagging system or improved suggestions in the Experimental section.
The idea of being able to participate within an artist community and see the growth of others was an inspirational experience for up-and-coming artists. Artists explained that the “music nirvana” for them was when another artist or producer responds, shares, or resonates with their work because it made them feel that the time they put in to create was worth it. It would be interesting to see what other design features could be implemented to facilitate this type of engagement, such as active tutorials, a point system for artist engagement, or even a complimenting record like Yelp uses for their reviews.
There are business implications for artists to post sets and remixes of music that is copyrighted unless they have a licensing deal with the original music’s label or artist. If the artist does not own a license to use a track, then they cannot legally monetize it. Spotify currently allows some remixes through, but have not widely approved longer DJ sets. This could stem from licensing issues or even monetary goals since tracks are monetized per play. If a DJ set is an hour long, there would be a lot fewer plays than normal. Through an experimental section, Spotify may be more willing to approve the content that artists post. That being said, it might be worthwhile to present this idea to a record label or even a Spotify curator to better understand their point of view.
Reflections
Overall, what began as a curiosity to design for one of my most-used applications became an investigation about the audio streaming landscape and listener habits. I wanted to reinforce what I have learned as a UX researcher and designer, and better understand what it means to design for the user when constrained in a business environment.
As for further research, I would focus more on ways to better measure success of the product and user habits.
- Measuring connection strength between artists – proxy’d by a measure of social usage time, spent looking for other artists, time spent chatting in chatrooms, time spent looking at Behind the Sound feature, number of texts sent over a time period with average message length, feedback in the form of likes
- Measures of usage – time spent in Experimental section
- Analysis – understanding which features were most used/valuable. Qualitative understanding of impact on user journey for creators/listeners. Perhaps there is better features that can drive social interaction or even boost an artist’s following.
UX Learnings:
- The Jobs-to-be-Done framework is a good framework tool to answer “why would a user/customer buy my product or service?” and set the a good frame for understanding Spotify and SoundCloud users’ intents
- Using the right tools for the right job. Since I was targeting aspects of Spotify and Soundcloud, using a Journey map to map the whole audio journey may not have been the right tool since each one has their own audio journey. However, it did give me a good idea of the audio streaming journey through a lens and a better understanding of who the listeners and creators are and where their journeys may differ.
- Understanding requirements vs ideas when brainstorming. At some stage, I kept thinking “easy-to-use,” “user-friendly,” “quick-to-access” were necessary when ideating solutions, but realized they were not solutions for my “how might we…” questions. During brainstorming, divergent ideas were best initially to open up the solution space, then building depth by creating requirements for the solution.
- When testing your product, define scenarios and clear goals before the test. Give a task and let them explore and refrain from explaining the thoughts behind the prototype. Let the user talk about their experience.
- Sketching out conversations with users in addition to writing down their quotes helped me think more abstractly about the needs of the user. I found when I wrote down notes and every word of the user, it constrained the way I was thinking and it made it more difficult to synthesize from the paragraphs of words. By sketching, I was able to better internalize what they were saying. This helped me structure my thoughts better throughout the design process.
Appendix
This project initially started off as a redesign for SoundCloud’s mobile application to better address user needs in order to improve their paid subscription rate. Although Soundcloud has a massive following of 175 million users, it has been behind Spotify and Apple Music in paid subscribers with only miniscule fraction of their users being paid users. My initial research discovered the consensus seemed to be that SoundCloud seemed to be a stepping stone for up-and-coming artists and DJs to gain popularity before moving on to other audio streaming services to make money. It didn’t make sense to just redesign the SoundCloud app for usability since it’s problems with monetization has it’s own complexities in the business model. I wanted to focus on the reasons why SoundCloud has such a massive following. Users often split their music needs between using their favorite streaming application and SoundCloud. With Spotify having a commanding lead in the streaming world, I used their app as a framework to pursue the study.