Type: Personal project | Timeline: 2023 (1 week) | Role: UX Designer
Increasing Spotify users’ access to live music experiences hosted by their favourite artists
Scroll ↓
How might we increase Spotify users’ access to live music experiences hosted by their favourite artists?
Brief
This was a 1-week personal project to explore how I might showcase my ability to draw from my interdisciplinary skillsets in business, engineering, and design to propose valuable ideas for a company.
Outcome
A fully designed Figma prototype and a detailed report outlining my rationale, which I was fortunate to share with employees at Spotify. The report included the following deliverables:
SWOT analysis / Persona / User interviews / User flow diagrams / Competitor assessments / Wireframes / Figma prototype
SWOT-analysis of Spotify
I started by conducting a macro-level SWOT analysis of Spotify, exploring its current strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats in the market. This was done by studying secondary literature such as news articles, research papers, and analysing market data.
Supplementary research
Moreover, I supplemented my research by exploring micro-level issues current Spotify listeners face through 5 user interviews.
With this in mind, the following paint points could be outlined for the respective stakeholders of Spotify itself, listeners, and artists:
Key pain points for Spotify
01
Spotify has no apparent value proposition differentiating it from an increasingly competitive landscape.
Detail: The company’s entry into audiobooks and podcasts are insufficient, with rivals like Apple and Amazon easily matching its value proposition. These new markets also bring further costs to the platform through fees to book publishers and popular podcasts hosts, with little room to increase Spotify’s subscription prices.
02
Rivals are increasingly offering a broader value proposition Spotify is unable to compete with.
Detail: For instance, Apple and Amazon bundling their music services with other offerings like fitness and movie streaming with Apple One and Amazon Prime.
03
About 65-70% of Spotify’s revenue is currently set aside to pay royalties to record labels and rightsholders.
04
Spotify’s paying user base still remains the minority compared to its free-tier user base. This highlights the need for a sufficiently stronger value proposition to convert free-tier users into paying customers.
Key pain points for listeners
Many music listeners strongly desire to see their favourite artists play live; however, they often never get the chance to do so.
Detail: Concert tickets may be too expensive, tickets may be sold out, their favourite artists may have no concerts in their area, or listeners may feel they have no one to go with. Their only live music experience may be concert footage from a random person’s phone, posted on Youtube, weeks later.
Key pain points for artists
01
Artists make negligible amounts of money per stream on music platforms. Whilst mainstream artists can cash in millions, up-and-coming ones barely have a financial platform to launch their careers.
02
Music streaming only makes up a small percentage of artists’ income. The big money is attained through live performances and ticket sales.
03
Concert income is heavily constrained by artists' physical capacity, financials, venue size, and geographic location. The enabling potential of digital platforms to reach a significantly broader fan base and eliminate these constraints remain untapped.
Ideation
To address all of the listed problems, I wanted to explore how Spotify might increase listeners’ access to live music experiences hosted by their favourite artists — a problem if solved successfully, could bring significant value to all stakeholders.
I brainstormed various ideas and analysed them along the dimensions of desirability, feasibility, and viability — something that would solve key listener user pain points, be feasible to implement for the short term, and generate revenue.
Outlined target persona
Solution design
Spotify Live Jams: A feature enabling artists to host virtual concerts/jams accessible to fans across the globe, through Spotify.
01 Live jams
A section with current/upcoming jams is accessible through Spotify for users to listen to; however, the jams will be behind a paywall (tickets) to support artists — equalling a cup of coffee or slightly more.
02 Personalised recommendations
Live Jams may be recommended to users based on listening habits, music genre, and popularity among other listeners
03 Tickets
To tune into a jam, users may purchase a ticket before the scheduled time or while it’s ongoing.
To better entice interest in purchasing a ticket, I suggest allowing users to preview the live jam for 5 minutes before prompting them to buy a ticket to view the rest of the concert.
04 Social interactions
While attending, users are able to engage with the artist through emoji expressions and short comments.
Link to the concert may also be shared on social media with friends to incentivise increased attendance.
User flow diagrams
To better outline the user flows of this newly proposed feature, I designed two different flows to exemplify two use case scenarios.
01 User flow
Exploring the Live Jams category and attending a jam
User story: As a user I want to find relevant virtual concerts to attend, so that I can hear my favourite artists play live and discover new ones.
02 User flow
User story: As a user I want to find out if particular artists I like are hosting a live jam, so that I can plan ahead.
If I had more time
Conducted testing sessions with 5-8 users to understand if the discovered pain points were addressed and validate the devised value propositions.
Discussed key priorities influencing the solution with relevant stakeholders from Spotify, and inquired about feasibility constraints with developers.
Refined the solution's aesthetics to be more seamlessly integrated with the Spotify application.
What I learned
This project taught me how to better draw from my interdisciplinary design, business, and engineering skills to devise a valuable product idea for a company.
The project was a great exercise in constraining new feature propositions and design elements within a company's existing design system.
I learned how to better consider the needs of multiple and distinct stakeholders into one coherent product idea.