Songwriter pages
Empowering songwriters with data
https://artists.spotify.com/blog/songwriter-pages
Examples: Julia Michaels, Brian Lee, Digi
To comply with my non-disclosure agreement, I have omitted confidential information.
MY ROLE
I am the UX lead of this project. I defined the product and designed the experience, while working closely with researchers and engineers. This was work was completed in one quarter.
impact
Launching the first pilot on January 2020 with 125 songwriters, the product helped Spotify’s hold of publishing data increase from 43% to 60%. In just the first week, this product acquired more than 63,000 page views and correct 27.4% of publishing data. Not only that, this product gave exposure to behind the scenes creators and provided ways for songwriter to share their discographies both externally and internally in the music business. Meghan Trainor, a singer songwriter, wrote “It’s so cool that Spotify is working hard to find ways to promote and give credit to songwriter! Having a platform that appreciates and celebrates the songwriting community is exciting and important!”
HOW might we better understand publishing data and empower creators?
Spotify and the rest of the music industry has suffered from muddy publishing, royalty and licensing data. This lack of transparency has hindered not only creators but also digital service providers like Spotify resulting licenses and royalties to be unfairly distributed. Hence Spotify needed to understand publishing data more accurately and with less dependency from third party sources. The initial solution came with an analytics tool that shared streaming data from publishers. However this didn’t seem to enough to get a better understanding of more publishing data.
Product strategy
We needed a greater nudge/motivation for publishers to share publishing data. With our knowledge of the publishers client relationship with songwriters, we sought for a product that necessitated codependency on Spotify, publisher and songwriters. After we had gathered that songwriters needed a promotional tool, we created a product where we used existing and new publishing data sent by publishers to create pages for songwriters.
The Discovery
Research
We looked into ways to better collect publishing data. We knew that publishers were in charge of publishing data but they ultimately came from songwriters. Therefore we looked for opportunities to actively include songwriters in the process of understanding their work. After speaking to a few songwriters, we quickly found that this key player in the music industry was often overlooked and voiced a need to easily promote their work and identity.
Co-creation workshops
We hosted 3 co-creation workshops with 18 creators and we collected the findings below.
1. Songwriters had to promote themselves to be discovered for collaboration opportunities. This was the main way of getting businesses and writing more songs. However, not everyone enjoyed doing this and did not know how they should be doing this.
2. Both fans and music industry workers did not have a credible source to look up works written by songwriters.
“You go on Wikipedia and it’s like so-and-so wrote this under the name... Kodenzo and I’m like, ‘Who the fuck is Kodenzo?’ And you can’t even find that information because they might be an alias of an alias of an alias, whoever it is.”
3. Songwriters did not want to maintain their page and wanted most of the content to be automatically populated. In addition to share the list of their works, sharing their top works and latest style was most important.
Design - proof of concept
We had four months to launch this project including all back end engineering work, communications with publishers and songwriters as well as the implementation of the design. We sought to create an MVP to test our hypothesis.
Flow
Features and layout
automatic selection of Dynamic color
Showing character and personalization was important. With very little input we had from songwriters, I had to find a solution that would bring color - figuratively and literally - to each songwriter page. Since we had access to album covers for works of songwriters, I decided to use a color extractor that would extract Spotify branded colors that would give each Songwriter page…color.
automatically Showing a songwriter’s latest style
Since we a had a short time frame to complete this launch, we couldn’t build an interface where songwriters could personalize their content. With the data that we already had access to, we had to decide on a way to show the latest evolving style of a writer.
This is how we decided to show the latest release, which often times shows the current style of a songwriter. There were permutations that we had to consider when showing the latest release of a single or an album that a songwriter contributed.
Motivating songwriters to create a songwriter page
Communicating the dependency of publishers to creating songwriter pages was important. Therefore prioritizing information and CTAs was important.
Bringing back average users back to Spotify was important as Songwriter pages wasn’t an in app experience.
Nudging songwriter to request their songwriter page to their publishers.
Informing that songwriters need to reach out to their publishers to create this page.
selection Top artist collaborators with spotify data
Artist link to artist profile page on Spotify consumer app.
Many songwriters are also performing artists. Also the most frequently collaborated performing artists also shed light on their style of composition.
Final design
impact & Next steps
We were able to confirm this proof of concept as a success. Within just 4 months and 250 songwriters, we were able to increase stream share by 50%. With this confirmation, I am currently in the process of creating a workflow for publishers to seamlessly submit their publishing data (CWR). This work includes designing permission and access, interface for publishers to submit and correct publishing data.