Spotify for Artist Home Redesign
Orienting customers to valuable actions and insights the second they log into Spotify for Artists
Role
My role on this project was as the design lead working closely with product, engineering and data science.
Background
Spotify for artists (S4A) is the tool artists and their teams use to understand their performance and grow their audience on Spotify. I will speak about this project in its three key phases.
Home modules experiment
Release checklist rollout
The future of Spotify for Artist home
Problem
When artists access Spotify for Artists, the current experience lacks timely and personalized insights into their music journey. For labels handling numerous artists, juggling various tasks can be challenging. Meanwhile, smaller independent artists face the risk of overlooking important factors that could significantly impact their growth and performance on Spotify. For instance, when a new album releases, tracking its performance requires extensive digging. The screen above shows the unchanging experience we were delivering to artists regardless of where they were in their journey.
Spoiler: Its mostly just stale marketing material…
This results in missed opportunities for artists to significantly grow their audience. Simultaneously, Spotify missed out on pivotal, profitable actions. By enhancing this experience, we can empower and grow artists while also boosting Spotify's potential for success.
“When I log into Spotify for Artists, the first thing I do is leave the home page...because there is just nothing relevant there for me... ”
Scope
Our main aim was to understand how artists and teams, regardless of their size, navigate their work processes. We wanted to create an effective hub that guides customers to the essential information and actions.
To tackle this big task, we delved into the core workflows, forming a step-by-step plan. We then rolled out these features gradually to customers, making sure it was a well-thought-out process for a smoother adoption.
Gaining understanding
Working closely with customers of all size, we began to map out every capability in Spotify for Artists and understand where those functions most closely sit across the artists journey.
Basic end to end journey of an artist from preparing for a release, the release cycle, to off cycle.
Experimentation: Modules on Home
The redesign of the home experience in Spotify for artists was a monumental effort. We asked: What could we deliver in the next month on home to customers that would provide them instant value and provide us with necessary learnings? When we look across the release journey there are two moments that we identified that we had high certainty there was something valuable to implement.
The pre-release experience: A time where many actions are being taking to optimize the strength of a release and and teams are hyping up the drop to an artists die-hard fans.
Right after the release drop: When customers are monitoring performance of their release.
For this experience, I designed a module that lives right on home that gives customers an immediate and obvious pathway into the tasks they need to take for a pre-release and a module after the release drops for customers to see that release, how it is performing, and a quick pathway into a deeper data experience.
Results of the modules on home
The results of this were absolutely staggering. A 48% engagement rate in the first 2 weeks (of all customers being shown the module) and a clickthrough 8x any other feature on Spotify for Artists. Months after its release, it is still the feature with the highest engagement.
This gave us clear validation to move forward with the next phases of this release. We used this as a touchpoint to talk with customers and gain qualitative feedback that can also inform the next phase and iteration of design.
Evolution of the modules
With the success of the modules, our next phase was expanding to the entire release journey. We're focused on enabling customers to confidently complete all necessary tasks for a successful artist release. The goal is to make this process seamless, allowing users to stay on the artist's home screen without having to navigate away to check what needs to be done.
The Release Checklist
The next phase evolves the release modules to the entire release cycle.
For artists that aren’t very tech-savvy, this upgrade allows them a way to feel confident that they are doing everything they can for their releases to be successful on Spotify. For customers at larger labels, this change also greatly reduces the legwork they need to do to check in that everything has been done for the handful of artists they focus one.
Recap (then, now, next, later)
Future of Spotify for Artist Home
Finally, the last stage of this effort (which is where things are at now) is focused on ALL items that may need someone’s attention for growing on Spotify. We spent a lot of time focused on the release moments, but there are other instances where artists and their teams have opportunities to grow and expand their audience and eminence on Spotify. Moments like data spikes, end of year wrapped, campaigns for older catalogue music are all examples of moments where an artist and their team may want to reengage their audience.
Example: Lets say that a song in an artists older catalogue of music shows up on a popular TV show and all of a sudden, that song sees a spike in listenership. The artists and their teams can use this momentum to leverage Spotify listenership to grow their audience.
Emphasizing relevant education is also a huge component of this initiative, helping customers better understand which actions have provided them with attributable benefit.
Anatomy of the future of home
Next Steps:
The next steps of this project will be refining the future scope of home based off of feedback we receive from customers and the data that comes back after the full launch of the release checklist. The core focus will be on tasks that customers can take off-cycle that continue to help them grow their audiences on Spotify.