Soundcloud
Case Study
THE OVERVIEW
Project Timeline
2 weeks
My Role
Visual Design Lead, UX Researcher & UX Designer in a team of 3
Company
Soundcloud
Task
New feature implementation for a music app
INTRODUCTION
SoundCloud is the world’s largest music and audio platform that lets people discover and enjoy the greatest selection of music from the most diverse creator community in the world.
What does it have to offer?
175 million active and unique users
125 million number of songs
Artists can independently promote their music
Musicians have an ability to instant feedback from other passionate music lovers
BUSINESS RESEARCH
We started our project by doing business research to have a better understanding of the business's strong sides and aspects that need improvement. In this section, I will briefly walk you through SWOT and C&C analysis for SoundCloud.
SWOT Analysis
The world’s largest music and audio platform, SoundCloud lets people discover and enjoy the greatest selection of music from the most diverse creator community on earth.
STRENGHTS
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A robust community of artists
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Immediately upload, record, promote and share content for free
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Comment within any part of a track/audio file
WEAKNESSES
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Unregulated and peremptory opportunity for copyright holders to remove content
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Lack of sustainable monetization model
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Low entry barrier for new users affects quality of uploaded content
OPPORTUNITIES
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Turn more of the 175 million users into content creators
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$15 million pledge to the artists. Initiatives include an artist accelerator program worth $10 million.
THREATS
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Highly competitive and oversaturated market
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Unresolved issues with using copyright content for unofficial purposes
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Solvency issue due to financial dependency
Competitive Analysis
To learn more about what is being done in the music app industry, our team did the competitive analysis and compared SoundCloud to other popular music apps. We compared features for artists and listeners in such apps as Bandcamp, Audiomack, and Spotify.
Comparative Analysis
We looked at a few indirect companies outside of our industry to learn how they create a connection with content creators and engage their users as we felt Soundcloud had this opportunity with their user base.
Youtube is an exceptional example as they use their ad revenue to build a sustainable monetization model and really empower their content creators which in the long term helps the business by making content creators loyal to the platform.
Instagram is another great example of a social platform that leverages its large user base to also be content creators for them or otherwise known as influencers. Instagram does not offer a monetization model for content creators, but it is a good platform for getting exposure with the help of paid promotional campaigns that allow users to boost their content and gain more followers.
Twitch is a company that really took off in 2020 during the pandemic, they are notorious for their gamer streaming content and creating really strong fan engagement. Twitch also gives users an opportunity to support their favorite content creators with payments and gives users recognition for that.
USER RESEARCH
User Interviews
We decided to focus on new features for the artists who share their music on SoundCloud, so we interviewed 4 music artists and asked about their views of Soundcloud and their experience using an online audio distribution platform. Here are our main takeaways from those interviews.
MONETIZATION
4/4
All artists we interviewed think that the current monetization model does not pay music artists fairly
FAN ENGAGEMENT
4/4
All interviewed artists notice that music platforms lack a social component to interact with fans
EXPOSURE
4/4
All participants agree that it takes too much effort to expose your music, there are no great tools to promote or boost their content
After user interviews we did some more research on artists making money with music streaming platforms. We learned that industry of disturbing new music statistic claims that artists only got 12% of the $43 billion the industry generated in 2017, according to a new Citigroup report published.
User Personas
Based on the results we gathered after user interviews my team and I created user personas who we then kept in mind throughout the rest of the process. We started by creating an artist persona.
Even though we were planning to design new features that would be helpful for the artists, those features were based on how listeners would interact with musicians. We decided that we would build the listener's view of the app with all the new features we would be adding for the artists. For that reason, we also created a listener persona.
Problem Statement
Music artists need to be compensated fairly for creating content on online audio distribution platforms so they can create music full-time
How Might We...
1
Find a better way for the music artists to earn income other than the traditional streaming revenue?
2
Create a platform that allows for social engagement between artists and their fans?
3
Allow fans to support their favorite artists?
4
Motivate artists to post their music to our platform to attract more listeners?
Feature Prioritization Matrix
As a team, we did a brainstorming session during which we compiled a list of potential new features we could design to solve our problem. Then we rated them by the impact they would make and the difficulty of designing them and created a feature prioritization matrix.
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Livestreams / online e-concerts + live chat
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Donate button
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Artist subscription plans
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Virtual breakout rooms for networking
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Redesign interface for reaching more listeners
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Paid promotions (boosting songs/albums)
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Redesign commenting on tracks feature
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Allow users to fund artists' projects through crowdfunding
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Selling concert tickets
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Selling merchandise / auctioning gear
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Private Skype shows or calls
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Selling beats and samples
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Writing custom songs for fans
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Teach music classes or sell lessons
The visual layout of the features on the matrix helped us make a decision to go forward with 3 features:
1. Implementing live streams in SoundCloud to give artists an opportunity to give live concerts, interviews or talk to their audience in real time.
2. Give users a way to make donations to their favorite artists during the live streams, which would also be a source of revenue for both artists and the app.
3. Give listeners an opportunity to support their favorite musicians on regular basis by subscribing for monthly donations and getting perks from the artists.
Solution
All of that brought us to the solution we were going to design for SoundCloud.
Soundcloud will create a platform for music artists to live stream performances and engage their fanbase in real-time, allowing fans to comment, subscribe, and donate funds to their favorite artists.
DESIGN
User Flow: Donating To Artist During Live Stream
We started our design process by creating user flows that helped us document each step of the processes users would be able to complete with the new features.
Two flows we wanted to pay attention to get to our solution were:
1. Donating funds to your favorite artist during a live stream - we all agreed the user would feel most empathetic towards the artist during a live stream vs any other time - this is the upper section of the user flow.
2. Afford the users the ability to register for future live online concerts that aren't currently live or playing - this is illustrated in the bottom portion of this flow.
Site Map
To visually present where live stream features would be in the Soundcloud app we designed a sitemap.
Here highlighted in orange you can see where we would house the live streaming feature in the current infrastructure - primarily in the home screen as well as the local navigation bar. We also wanted to include any saved upcoming live streams to be found in the user's library as we found through testing that users normally associate the library with their personal selections.
Design Studio: Sketches
We knew we wanted to focus on 3 different screens primarily and we each came up with 2 versions of these screens. Our team got together to do a design studio activity where each of us separately sketched two versions of the same screen. We gathered all our sketches together on the Miro board and, went over them together, and took notes about detail we liked and didn't like. That allowed us to take the best ideas and put them into our wireframes.
Live Stream Interface
Here you'll find our designs for the live stream page with green post-its signifying what we liked and intended to implement into the digital wireframes for testing. Things like having donate & follow buttons, a chat box, portrait full-screen mode, etc.
Event Detail Page
For our event page, we wanted key highlights about the event such as time and date, number of attendees, short description, and a button to register for the event.
Browsing Live Streams Page
For browsing live streams, we played around with the layout for browsing larger categories and filter options for users who knew what type of music they wanted to live stream.
Wireframes
After a group discussion of our sketches, we gathered all of the ideas and elements we wanted to have on each screen and started working on our wireframes. Below you can find our wireframes for three screens: The live Streams section of the app, the Event page, and the interface of a real-time live stream.
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Filter dropdown for genres & moods
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See All opens a page dedicated to this category
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Time & Date of future Stream
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Events
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Search feature for users who know which artist to find
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CTA button to register for an event
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CTA button to follow the artist
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CTA button to share this event
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Indicator to see in real-time the number of attendees
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Feature to broadcast to TV or Bluetooth device
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Real-time notification after a donation or subscription is made
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Live video
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CTA button to donate or subscribe to the current artist
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Chat box feature for fan engagement
Usability Testing
After creating wireframes we conducted 2 rounds of user testing with 8 participants in the age of 20-35 years old.
Participants have been given two tasks to complete:
Task 1: Join live stream currently playing by indie artist Laura Welsh and carry out a donation and a subscription payment to this artist
Task 2: Register as an attendee for indie artist, Vagabon's upcoming live concert and find this event in your upcoming streams
Usability Testing Results
of participants had difficulty finding artist name on the browsing page
We flipped artist's name and event name on the Live Streams page as is this case users are looking fort the artist's name first.
users found the Soundcloud layout (on the right) to be better than the Spotify version (on the left)
We tried changing the layout of the browsing pages of the app and making live stream covers smaller to fit more content, but user testing showed that all participants agreed on Soundcloud's original layout to be better.
Iterations
Usability Testing Results
of participants found the presentation of subscription plans to be unclear, they could not quite understand if it's a subscription for the app of the artist
We changed the copy from "Subscribe for Exclusive Benefits' to 'Subscribe to Laura Welsh' to make it more clear that the user is subscribing to a specific artist.
users mentioned that they would like to know how much of their payment is actually going directly to the artist
To make that clear we added a line right below the subscription option explaining that 80% of the user's payment goes directly to the artist.
Iterations
Design System
As a Visual Design Lead I was responsible for the UI part of the project. Before starting the final mockups of the app, I created a design system that included all of the visual elements (color palette, CTAs, icons, logo, typography and other elements) used in the final design.
NEXT STEPS
For the next steps of the projects we would like to implements some other features to allow more engagements between artists and fans as well as fan recognition system and customization options for the content creators.
SUBSCRIPTION PRICING
Bigger name artists can designate their own pricing and user benefits
LEADER
BOARD
Reward super fans with recognition and additional exclusive benefits
SONG POLL REQUEST
Artists can take a poll with their listeners to see which one of their songs they want to hear next
CHANNEL
POINTS
Customizable points program to reward those watching with perks