Activating Song Credits to build Spotify Creator Pages
PRODUCT DESIGN · PRODUCT MANAGEMENT · WEB · 0 TO 1
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INTRODUCTION
Imagine you’re listening to music on Spotify and a song really grabs your attention. Specifically, the production of the song blows you away - groovy percussion, chilling piano runs, shimmering strings.
Who produced this song, you wonder. You pull up your phone, click on 'show song credits' and see that the song was produced by Karan Viegas.
You want to learn more about them. What other songs have they worked on? What genres and moods do they work with? Perhaps you're a singer - would they be interested in producing my debut single?
Sadly, the name in the song credits doesn’t take me anywhere - it’s a dead end.
Now, this experience obviously hurts listeners who are eager to explore. But it hurts producers, songwriters, instrumentalists & sound engineers even more. These non-artist creators have consistently been forgotten backstage. Moreover, their work is highly collaborative - networking helps them find new projects and get compensation leverage. In this hack project, we found some ways to fix this.
MY ROLE
I led the project, wrote up a product requirements doc, recruited the team and design hi-fi mockups in Figma. I set up a schedule and regular meetings for us to collaborate and touch base.
I also built the pitch deck with contributions from the entire team, and presented out project at Spotify Hackweek 2023.
TOOLS USED
Figma, Google Docs, Google Slides, Google Meet, pen & paper
THE TEAM
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Natasha, data engineer
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Jacob, senior frontend developer
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Michael, senior backend engineer
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JD, backend engineer
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Arielle, design system consultant
THE TIMELINE
Mar 2023
This was a hack project, for Spotify Hackweek 2023
OVERVIEW OF THE EXPERIENCE
Shine a light backstage
If you're curious about any song on Spotify, you can click on Show credits to learn about the creators who worked on it.
Unblock discovery rabbitholes
The credits not only display the main artists ('performed by') and the songwriters ('written by'), but also additional people such as producers, mix engineers, session instrumentalists & conductors.
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Every credit is clickable and redirects to a dedicated page for that creator
Faciliate creator collaboration
Role Filters
Filter songs by the creator's role on them
Top Artist Collaborators
View the most popular artists the creator has worked with
Primary Genres
Understand the styles this creator leans toward
Connect with them
Link to the creator's profile on popular collaboration tools
THE OPPORTUNITIES
Shine a light backstage
There’s plenty of media coverage on how the teams supporting artists - producers, mix engineers, instrumentalists - are overlooked.
But these people are the reason the music and mix of a record sound stellar. Lack of recognition can adversely impact their contracts and creative split agreements.
We have seen listeners become "super fans" of artists - how might we extend this to songwriters and producers to boost recognition, streaming conversion metrics and royalty payouts?
How might we raise awareness of song credits, unblock discovery of non-artist creators and factor them into recommendation decisions?
Faciliate creator collaboration
Making music is collaborative by nature.
Producers, engineers and session instrumentalists rely heavily on word-of-mouth and organic channels to find artists to collaborate with.
This problem is severely exacerbated for independent creators who don’t have their label’s network to lean on.
Spotify owns collaboration tools like Soundtrap and (formerly) Soundbetter. How might we make it easier for creators to explore other creators and their work? How might we create pathways to collaboration?
Unblock discovery rabbitholes
Listener engagement is core to Spotify's mission. Actively (vs. passively) engaged listeners are also more monetizable via ads. The existing song credits are mostly dead ends, and songwriter pages are not housed within the app. How might we boost in-app listener engagement?
The streaming era challenged the cozy analog experience of opening up a vinyl album cover and reading through liner notes, to the chagrin of traditional listeners and audiophiles. How might we pay tribute to this listening experience?
Imagine Spotify's AI DJ saying: “Hey, I noticed you enjoyed some songs written by Max Martin. Here are some more!” How might we make more credit-informed recommendations?
THE EXISTING FEATURES: SONG CREDITS & SONGWRITER PAGES
Spotify has had features for song credits and songwriter pages.
But they have several limitations.
Incomplete credits
They only include performers, songwriters & producers, leaving out engineers, instrumentalists, remixers…
This credit metadata is delivered to us from labels only.
Credits are dead ends
Almost all song credits do not link anywhere, which stops users from further exploration.
Limited songwriter pages
Songwriter pages exist in beta for 1648 songwriters (spoiler: with our data we had 94,408). Labels manually opt in to the beta, which means independent songwriters aren’t welcome. There are also issues with name aliases.
Mmkay, but who cares?
Well, when we looked at the usage data, there had already been 213M+ views of song credits from 24M+ unique users in the first three months of 2023. That's who cares.
THE GOAL
Every track has complete credits that link users to dedicated Creator pages
We enrich our data model with uniquely identifiable non-artist creators and all the songs they’re credited on in different roles.
This also unlocks a new wave of creator-oriented features while unshackling listeners to freely explore creators and their work.
Sounds familiar? Yes, that’s the Spotify mission.
THE PROCESS
PROCESS
Existing customer feedback
User interviews
Survey
Product brief
Project schedule for hackweek
Product Requirements Docs (PRDs)
Data structure design
Lo-fi wireframes
Hi-fi prototypes
Usability testing
Building the data structure
Building the app features
USER RESEARCH
In spite of the constrained timeline we were working with for this project, we conducted research to validate our hypotheses, underscore the opportunities and uncover new qualitative insights.
We ran one survey each of creators and listeners.
We also conducted internal user testing with creators within Spotify.
Here are some of the positive indicators we received:
What would they like to see?
What did they think of our solution?
"I would love for tracks to show producer, mix and master credits"
"I would like producer names or the ability to click on their names with links to profiles"
"We need Engineer credits like Tidal"
"Bio of the person. Like a bit of Wikipedia information"
"It would be super cool to be able to search by contributer, e.g. searching James Jamerson should show you the top tracks he played on"
"I would like to see related producers and playlists for that producer"
"I'm expressing interest in a songwriter page as an independent songwriter not tied to a publisher"
"I’m learning to produce music and I often follow producers who produce songs that I really like. The song credits is what drives me to the producer"
"this. is. amazing. so much info, i absolutely love how you can select between different roles and different genres"
"I like it because I get to get to know more music I might like"
Additionally, existing research findings on the existing songwriter pages feature told us that
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songwriters were unhappy that the beta feature was only offered to a sliver of songwriters, and through label buy-in only
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listeners were annoyed about being led outside the Spotify app to view a songwriter page
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the pages essentially just listed out credited songs, it didn't reveal more about the songwriter like biography or styles
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The good news was, in the first 3 months of 2023, there were 2M+ clicks on songwriter credits from 1.6M unique listeners
THE DATA MODEL
The incredible dataset we built powered song credit data for the top ~1 million most popular tracks and spanned 579,497 unique creator identities.
Of 579,497 unique creators there were
49961 Main Artists
14873 Featured Artists
6394 Vocalists
5396 Instrumentalists
4543 Producers
3352 Remixer
1432 Arrangers
1045 Mixers
743 Composers
674 Recording Engineers
665 Conductors
565 Engineers (Mix/Master)
Sources
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Label Metadata (already existed in Spotify)
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Display Artist - tracks
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Spotify for Publishers:
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Works to songwriters - from publishers (PROs)
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MusicBrainz
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Performing artist - tracks edges (composer, producer, instrumentalist)
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Harmonia Music Industry Ontology Dataset Creators product
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Harmonia Songwriters product
Entities
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Songwriters
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Spotify Artist Pages
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Creative Works
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Musical works (the original composition)
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Recordings (renditions / covers of a musical work)
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Creators
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Persons (eg. Calvin Broadus)
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Identities (a person’s aliases)
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Personas (Snoop Dogg, Snoop Lion)
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Groups (a band name)
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Organizations (a label)
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The person’s specific roles (eg. instrumentalist, member of band) on works or groups
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Songwriters
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Spotify Artist Pages
Coverage
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Spotify Tracks
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Top 1 million (by global popularity rank)
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489,559 unique tracks
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Spotify Artists
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59040 Unique Spotify Artists
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More Sp Artists than Sp Identities because of duplicate Spotify Artists
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Spotify Artist Pages
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12 distinct track-related roles eg. remixer, instrumentalist, on works or tracks
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Creators (MIOD)
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37,641 Unique Persons – (individuals have multiple aliases)
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579,497 Unique Identities
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Creative Works (MIOD)
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Musical works (the original composition)
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269,512 (about half the no. of tracks)
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Recordings (renditions / covers of a musical work)
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1 million MIOD tracks
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94,408 Unique Spotify Songwriters (Content Intelligence)
THE IMPACT
XX%
increase in user engagement*
$YM
corrected payout discrepancies*
5700%
increase in songwriter data
26
average consumption hours per MAU*
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positive music industry sentiment
* based on projections
What's more, our data unlocked an entire roadmap of features.
💰 Fairer creator compensation
🤝 Creator collaboration
Mitigate missing payouts stemming from name aliases, incorrect song credits
Easier for creators to discover other creators. Link to collaboration tools like Soundtrap & Soundbetter
📈 Insights
🔗 Unified customer identity graph
Correlations, trends and insights on songwriter & producers can be shared in Wrapped, Spotify for Artists & other surfaced
This ‘Music Knowledge Graph’ can be further linked to our podcast data, Unified Business Identity platform, Spotify Manage etc.
🎵 Enhanced recommendations
Factor producers and songwriters into our recommendation algorithm, increasing engagement & driving up streaming conversion metrics.
AI DJ: “Hey, I noticed you enjoyed a few songs written by Max Martin. Here are some more!”