Artists create music from a deeply personal and intimate place. Those feelings were often captured and expressed via liner notes, sleeves and other mediums that were packaged closely with the music to help tell a deeper story. In today’s streaming world, that expression (and the chance to truly connect with listeners) has been reduced to square cover art and a single line of text.
NOTE: Due to confidentiality reasons, sensitive information such as the listener data we used to shape our initial set of beliefs and early experimentation work to help validate the direction, cannot be shared publicly.
I helped frame, set up and work through product opportunities with the team through a series of workshops, using the framework - 'Understand it, Think it, Build it, Ship it, Tweak it'. This cross disciplinary collaboration enabled each member to build empathy toward the problem space and created an atmosphere of inclusion and complete buy-in from the team.
Some workshop vibes:
Artist and user frustration...
TLDR;
After we discovered and defined (Understand it), we narrowed in and focused on some of the strongest concepts to develop and take further (Think it - Build it). Along this journey, we learned that artists especially those that were lower tier, felt anonymized by the success of Spotify playlists. There wasn't a way for artists to engage and convert passive listeners that came across their music and took high intent actions such as saving and adding to playlists.
Rounds of additional research, prototype testing, iterations later... we landed with a concept in what would eventually become 'storylines'.
The Now Playing View in the mobile app was a highly trafficked surface that was a missed opportunity for artists to engage listeners.
With collaboration from the consumer team, the new extended NPV (now playing view) was shipped. It became a rich, dynamic surface for artist content that was accessible throughout the Spotify experience, giving more artists more opportunities to attract new listeners, convert casual listeners and engage existing fans.
Listeners
How can a listener consume the content easily without interrupting their session? How can a listener get back to it and what actions can they take? It was critically important to define a UX model that could work seamlessly within the Spotify experience, not just in the main view we defined but as an extensible component that could be leveraged elsewhere.
Artists
What are the mechanics for creating the content? What can the content (static, video...) be? How might we help inspire artists to create,? What tools and features do they have at their disposal to help them stand out and allow their personality to shine through?
Storylines enables artists to tell deeper stories around their song(s) to engage fans and new listeners. Listeners can experience the content through the popularized 'story' format while in the Now Playing View of the Spotify mobile app. The story lives with that specific song in any context -- single, album or playlist.
"When you talk about the song with someone, explain where it came from, you form a deeper connection."
Listener value prop: Get insights about the music directly from the artist in the moment of listening.
Artist value prop: Connect with listeners and build fandom through authentic storytelling and expression.
