In such a fast paced industry, data visualization and effective communication tools are crucial for discovering trends before they happen and making quantitative and qualitative decisions about potential as early as possible. The goal of this project is to give music industry professionals tools to better visualize social media and digital streaming analytics with a focus on versatility of parameters and combining components of multiple facets of business in an all-in-one solution while minimizing overall task flows.

Problem

During a summer internship at a music booking agency I noticed several bottlenecks in enterprise software applications that limited music industry professional’s abilities to effectively communicate internally and analyze growth metrics on up and coming artists.

With so many resources needed presently to successfully discover and track up and coming talent, an all-encompassing platform could drastically reduce task flows and provide new insights in trend spotting.

Project Goals

1) Minimize task flows of various day-to-day work.

2) Ideate new innovative features that would aid in A&R’ing management.

3) Focus on versatility of features to empathize with many facets of music industry ecosystem.

4) Critically think of development feasibility of feature conception through external API documentation research.

Responsibilities

Role: UX/UI Designer, User Researcher, Product Owner

Project type: Enterprise Application

Platform: Web App/Product Extension

Tools: Pen & Paper, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe XD, Sketch

Approach

To reach an understanding of music industry professionals frustrations with current job-related software applications to help shape an all-encompassing solution focused on data visualization and less reliance on constant manual input.

• Information Architecture

• User Flow

• API Documentation Review

I reached out to over 30 music industry professionals from various fields in the industry including booking, A&R, marketing, and promotion to gain insights on their needs, motivations, and frustrations with current tools to help shape the app solution.

What are some of the challenges that music industry professionals face with current tools they use daily to help them make decisions?

What features in the tools they currently use are most critical?

What are the essential needs of various industry professional’s in order to scout, manage, and assess talent?

How are they interacting with the tools they currently use and what features/information resources do they have to find externally?

Lo-Fi prototype feedback, Hi-Fi prototype usability testing, Hi-Fi prototype iteration.

Overwhelmed by sources

With so many different ways to discover new artists, many music industry professionals find it increasingly more difficult than ever to keep up with so much oversaturation of content and find unique talent and organic followings.

Versatile search is important for users to have the ability to find artists and tracks that match specific preferences.

Logistics Within and Externally

Whether it’s reminding employees that they need to be at a certain show that night to cover an artist the company may potentially want to sign or sending a ticket request to the promoter for said show, users need effective communication methods both internally and externally.

Combining various aspects of internal and external communication components of business into an all-in-one solution would alleviate quite a few frustrations.

More Data!

Quite often, artists pitched on platforms at work don’t get constant updating, and assessing and managing potential clients requires time-consuming back and forth between internal and external platforms.

Utilizing streaming platform and social media platform API’s to pull analytical data into a single platform with intuitive design and visualization will drastically reduce time-consuming task flows and make artist growth easier to track and patterns and trends easier to spot.

Collaboration and Opinions Matter

Seeing what other users at specific companies think of an emerging artist often times makes an impact on the level of pursuit in signing them.

Users want to be able to review an artist’s music internally and be able to read other’s at their respective companies reviews as well. If higher ups/consensus shows positive feedback on an aggregated scale, it makes me decision-making easier.

Following user interviews, I was able to synthesize findings to create a user journey that would cover multiple industry jobs needs for finding new talent, tracking and analyzing growth, and communicating to make more informed decisions.

This research phase set the tone for feature ideation and prioritization.

Having front-end development and data analytics experience, I realize the importance of collaboration and understanding between development and design in all phases.

My process quite often has me depending on timeframe go in various depths of researching development feasibility and resources to empathize and effectively communicate with the entire product development process. Here I researched some of the API documentation for various external applications that would possibly be utilized in the MusicDB development.

Dashboard

User logs into the system using their streaming credentials. Here they can see three highest rated artists their specific company has been monitoring. When listening to music in the system, users will be able to rate any artists music so that the company can aggregate opinions. Users can view all upcoming shows for artists they're tracking in areas that they can manually set as well as assign others to cover a show that is a priority.

Shows

Track upcoming shows for artists users company is monitoring. Users have tools for specific shows such as venue info, requesting tickets, assign others to cover show, and more. Easily send users covering show a reminder email or confirmation that their ticket request has been approved. Filter between locations if specific company has multiple offices to see other shows that users could possibly cover to scout potential signees.

Artists Page

On the artists page users are able to submit new up and coming talent for review and tracking growth. Users can also see an overview of the highest rated artists from aggregating reviews at their specific company as well as who's trending on streaming platforms and the artist’s buzzing that haven’t been submitted internally for review yet. Users can filter the results by date to have more options for spotting trends.

Advanced Search

This versatile advanced search feature allows users searching for new artists to filter through an array of different categories to find artists and tracks that match the specific preferences. Over time, record labels and agencies will be able to notice trends and patterns that worked in the past when deciding between signing Artist A or Artist B by looking at these metrics. Employees can filter their searches by an abundance of parameters.

Analytics Dashboard

The first feature is key moments, where users can view individual tracks performance over an extended period of time from streaming services. This can give managers/labels/agents insight about how social action directly ties into growth for an artist. Users can compare streaming growth of the artist they're looking at with other up and coming artists in the same demographic that the streaming service pulls or even established artists with similar demographics to see career trajectory and how they compare with those artists at the same point in their careers.

Ran usability tests with those originally interviewed to gain insights on what could be improved regarding UX and better understanding of confusion/questions about feature ideation.

Overall, the tests resulted in a second iteration of high fidelity prototype that greatly improved user experience and minimized task flows within the application.

Learnings

Feature Ideation Limitations

After performing an abundance of user research figuring out and beginning to understand limitations of current software applications and needs of users, it was easy to get lost in sheer amount of feature possibilities for an all-encompassing platform for tracking artist growth. By narrowing down core needs and listening to frustrations first-hand from potential users, it was important to have a cohesive focus on a select few features that would allow collaboration between multiple parties and in turn make tasks less time consuming and remove a lot of manually inputing data and constant upkeep.

Empathy is Imperative

In an industry where there’s often a disconnect between timing of innovation and understanding its significance in the form of distribution methods from creators themselves and companies managing talent, it’s imperative when building a platform that hopes to be resourceful to many facets of the industry to establish trust and transparency between stakeholders. In order for this to be successful, companies of various size and areas of business must see value for themselves so empathizing through feature ideation that resonates with these many facets is crucial.