SPOTIFY MASHUP

BACKGROUND

Have you ever only liked one portion of a song and wished that you could only listen to that one snippet without having to go through the arduous process of skimmming through the entire song and finding the exact timestamp every time? This was a common problem that I, as well as the rest of my music-loving friends, encountered.

According to Google, a mashup is "a creative work usually in a form of a song, created by blending two or more pre-recorded songs, usually by superimposing the vocal track of one song seamlessly over the instrumental track of another". I always wanted an easy way to combine certain snippets of tracks that a normal playlist could never do. And in the age of music streaming, downloading music and manually creating mashups is troublesome.

This project is what creating mashups might look like on a popular (and my favorite) streaming platform, Spotify. I realize that there may be some issues with copyrights, so this design is purely speculative (and fun to create).

PROBLEM

HOW CAN WE IMPLEMENT A MASHUP FEATURE TO SPOTIFY?

We need a throwback to the late 1990s.

CHALLENGES

Users must be able to easily and intuitively create, edit, and listen to a mashup. The experience of creating a mashup must have distinguishable differences from creating a playlist.

USER RESEARCH

IDENTIFYING THE TARGET AUDIENCE

Since Spotify's user base is diverse in all backgrounds, so there's a lot of factors to consider when implementing a new feature.

From the above findings, I found it interesting that Millenials made up more than 50% of Spotify's users. However, I wanted to go deeper into the age question. Thus, I found this chart that shows Spotify usage by generation:

Gen Z-ers and Millenials stream the most music. This was valuable information because mashups exsited alongside with Millenials and I figured it would be a perfect way for both generations to connect through the creation of mashups on Spotify.

I also wanted to know more about users and playlists:

I was plesantly surprised to find out that a large amount of users listen to User Generated Content, confirming that Spotify is community based and values individual user creativity. Perhaps the same sentiment can exist for mashups!

ASKING QUESTIONS ABOUT MASHUPS

I also wanted to know what my peers thought of the idea, just to get more insight on how valuable this feature might be. I asked them a couple of questions on mashups:

• Are there any songs that you only like a part of?
• What do you know about mashups?
• Do you listen to them?
• Have you ever created a mashup?
• If yes, what apps or software do you use?
• Would having a mashup feature on Spotify improve your experience using the app?

My peers responded:

• Many are culprits of skipping parts of song or liking only part of a song.
• Many know the concept of mashups, but also refer to them as remixes.
• Some listen to them, mostly on Soundcloud.
• One particpant has made mashups and posted them Soundcloud, but made to manually create them using a mixing software, which name they can't remember. Many don't know how to create a mashup or know any softwares that can make mashups.
• Many said that mashups would be beneficial to the Spotify experience, but settle with playlists.

I also searched up how often the word 'mashup' was searched for on Google. Additionally, I looked up the stats for 'remix creator', since many know mashups as remixes:

From the data, it's pretty evident that mashups are a niche interest. But, with content creation being on the rise, I can imagine that implementing the feature on Spotify can increase the interest, while providing a feature that is completely unique from other music streaming apps.

RESEARCH SYNTHESIS

Based on the research above, I created a user flow on how I imagine a user would navigate the mashup process:

TAKE-AWAYS AND CONCLUSIONS

Thanks for reading my design process on implementing mashups for Spotify! Even though this may be speculative, it's fun to create hypothetical features for apps that already exist. This is my interpretation for redesigning the Spotify app, even if the redesign is just the simple addition of a feature. I recognize that this feature may be a niche interest for users, but I believe it's important to explore all ideas, even if they may not be possible. Innovation is what drives products to be better and failure is not a set-back, but rather progress.
What's next?

• Creating a desktop version
• Finding a more efficient way for editing a mashup, one that requires less taps
• Conducting more user research to really see how a larger user base feels about mashups