SPOTIFY FOR ARTISTS

Empowering musicians to manage their artistic presence on Spotify in a simple manner, enabling them to focus on what's most important - their music.

Approach and Contribution
  • User research and synthesis
  • ​Benchmarking, feature analysis
  • ​Persona, journey mapping
  • Ideation
  • High fidelity prototyping

Timeframe
1 week

Tools
 Figma

Stakeholders
​Design leads, Spotify musicians
​

Result
The project was well-received with positive feedback from stakeholders and end users. The HR team was so impressed that I was asked to design other corporate websites for them.

Vision and Approach

The brief for this challenge was to design a mac-based portal that allows artists to manage their presence on Spotify. To achieve this, I needed to understand the underlying pain points faced by music artists in getting their music released and broadcasted on Spotify. 

I approached this by using the Design Thinking model and the Desirability, Viability, Feasibility lenses.

Business Research

Spotify interacts with 5 different entities – the artist, music label, advertiser, free user and premium user. Free users are Ad supported, hence both kinds of listeners generate revenue for Spotify. Spotify uses this revenue to pay record labels and artists.
​I found that one particular group of artists struggled the most, and this was the independent artists. Spotify is actually quite a sensitive topic for some of them. Due to the nature of streaming platforms, many earn very little from it. They also struggle with exposure because they are artists, and creating is what they’re best at, not promoting.

User Research

I conducted two artist interviews, and also looked at artist feedback on various music related discussions on social media. One of my first insights was that there is a divide between listeners and artists. Most listeners had great things to say about Spotify, but with artists it was a mixed bag.

Benchmarking Analysis

Looking at these challenges, I wanted to take a step back – if Indie artists aren’t that fond of Spotify, what do they use instead?  Bandcamp stood out in popularity and likeability. There are many reasons for this, but one major point is that Bandcamp’s focus is actually the artists themselves, whereas Spotify’s focus is more on listeners. This resulted in both platforms having very different experiences.
​This got me thinking about how Spotify could leverage some of Bandcamp's strengths and make it work with their business model, and whether this is practical.

Feature Analysis

Synthesising the user research lead me to observe how the insights discovered tied in with features provided by Spotify for Artists.

​Problem Definition

Since I had a timeline of 1 week, I decided to focus on a single target audience - independent artists. While there are many different kinds of artists and labels, independent artists face extra challenges as uncovered by the research. This led to the following "How Might We" statement.
This problem statement led me to define a persona and their journey in releasing music.

Persona

Journey Mapping

Ideation

My ideation process involved rapid ideation to brainstorm as many ideas as possible, followed by slow ideation to refine them. These ideas were then segregated into the following themes.

Solution Approach

My solution approach involves using the ideation insights to break down the "How Might We" statement, understanding the components and features that affect it, and finding opportunities for improvement.

Prototyping

I created a prototype on Figma that incorporated the solution features that enhanced the user experience for artists. At the end of the week, I presented my approach and prototype, and received feedback. These are a few of the screens that include solution elements.

Key Learnings

The feedback received from this challenge taught me a lot about what went well and what could be improved on. The key challenge was using the short one week timeframe to uncover the most crucial insights and solutions. With more time, some aspects that could be improved are:
  • Digging deeper into the impact my solution would have on Spotify as a business.
  • Considering other audience groups and personas, like experienced artists, small labels and large labels.
  • Doing a more extensive benchmarking analysis, taking more competitors into account.
  • Including more iterations during the prototyping phase, starting from low fidelity/ paper prototypes.
  • Testing the prototype with end users.