Motivation
What are the must items for you when you go out? For me, as long as I have my phone and earbuds, I can survive the day.
Music is an essential part of life, whether to feel badass while walking, boost your morale before battle, or get into a happy mood. You'll see many people wearing earphones all over the city. And of course, you have your cell phone to fill the monotony of everyday life; whether it's to text your friends, watch YouTube videos, check stock prices, or Reddit memes, it's essential to keep up with what's going on in the world. I’ll admit, the last two probably pertain more to me lol.
The Problem
Social media is a tool that allows you to connect with many people. But on the other hand, you can also feel lonely in a world filled with meaningless captions and a desire for external validation. Yet, everyone has no choice but to rely on that shallow world to feel and stay connected.
Have you ever connected with someone solely through music? Not by looking at someone’s filtered photos, jobs, or titles, but through the music in their playlists, including ones you carefully curated or just your all-time favorites. Your playlists express who you are. Therefore, knowing what music someone listens to can help you get a feel for them.
However, music streaming platforms such as Spotify lack many features for social interaction, making it difficult to connect with people (FYI: the main social features currently available are to view your profile, your listening activity, playlists, followers/following, and recently played artists. You can also create collaborative playlists with other Spotify users).
Therefore, I suggest the following features to encourage connection-making on Spotify:
Adding a bio section on profiles
Create further customization tools for playlists and profiles (think of Discord)
Include methods to connect via other social media platforms (besides Facebook or Discord)
Develop a way to see someone’s favorite podcasts, artists, and songs at a glance
Create an in-platform inbox and messaging feature for sending and receiving recommendations
Establish discussion channels about music (think of Reddit, Genius, etc.)
Unfortunately, the ideas above will either never be implemented or take a long time to incorporate (FYI: Spotify took 4 years to add background videos to their desktop app). So, for people who can’t wait that long (including myself), I thought:
“As a long-time Spotify enthusiast since 2016, can I design a social media app for music that combines the best of Spotify, Reddit, and Discord all into one?”
And so my first design challenge began!
Ideation
I wanted to design three main screens: profile screen, messaging screen, and explore screen.
Profile
The profile screen would be the main area for users to express themselves. In the prototype, I wanted to show an example of a fully customized profile: a profile with a gradient background, a moving profile picture, a custom banner, and a bio introducing themselves. This was heavily inspired by the profile customization on Discord.
In addition to viewing the user's playlists and recently played artists, I added a feature for users to be able to curate their top five songs, podcasts, and audiobooks. Of course, this works under the assumption that you would be able to edit this list anytime you want.
Messaging
The private messaging (PM) screen is just like any other PM interface for social media. If there was a profile that interested you, you could have a conversation and share your music recommendations with them.
Sharing music is tedious. You have to go to the music streaming app, copy the song link, go back to your messaging app, and then paste the link. The easiest way to mitigate this process is if there was already a library of songs available in the app that you could search for. Then, once you find the song you want to recommend, you can share the song directly inside the app. Just like sharing an Instagram post with someone inside the Instagram app via PM.
Theoretically, there would also be a screen to see all existing conversations you had. Inside, I would add the discussion channels that you are a part of. These channels can be about discussing a specific artist, reviewing an album, or finding a group of people to go to a concert with.
Explore Page
The current trend in most social media apps is having a "For you" or an Explore page. I wanted to do something that X does. On your home feed, you can view music posts from the users you follow. These posts include a caption, a comment section, and buttons to share the post, add the song to your own playlists, and like the post. The song doesn't have to be just from Spotify. It could also be from a different platform (like SoundCloud or YouTube Music).
At the same time, you can get recommended posts from other users that you don't necessarily follow and expand your music bubble. It could be interesting to tailor your feed by adjusting your location or the variability in the type of music you are recommended (0 being the genre of music you most listen to and 1 being the genre of music you never listen to).
I also incorporated the feature to view and post 24-hour stories at the top of the Explore page. These stories can be about a song, a podcast episode, or an album that they're listening to right now. I swear Spotify did a beta testing of this idea around two years ago, but it sadly disappeared.
Final Thoughts
This was the first design project I worked on by myself with Figma. Before this, I had only learned the most basic Figma skills. Although there were issues with consistency in the design (and I did not know what a design system was lol), I'm glad that I was able to realize this idea into a visual prototype. I would love to continue this project and improve the design, revise some features, and even go further to develop it.
But, I want to leave on this note. Different types of social media apps have popped up left and right with the intention of meeting and connecting with friends, new and old. But, I don't think there have been any that have touched into the music market. Existing music-based social platforms are focused on either reviewing music or streaming music. I believe meeting somewhere in the middle and creating a casual, fun experience could be the key to a new enjoyment of music and friend-making.
If anyone has thoughts or is interested in working on this idea, let me know! And if someone from Spotify is reading this, please reconsider implementing or someone is going to take this idea away haha
