Spotify on Snapchat
Creating a legitimate artist promotion channel
Music lives on Snapchat already, however there’s no legitimate home for music on Snapchat. Users want to play and discover music on Snapchat as they are accustomed to audio in their video snaps. Currently, users resort to playing music in the background of a video or exit out of Snapchat to open a separate music app in order to play music. I proposed a browser that lives within Snapchat that is simple, easily discoverable and authentic.
This browser allows users to: attach Spotify song clips to photo and video messages, hear up to a 10 second clip of the attached song, and allow Spotify to program the suggested songs that appear in the search view. A successful design solution needed to include an attribution tag with the artist name, song title, and album artwork in order to keep in accordance with Spotify’s licenses.
After presenting the concept for feedback, the team thought a good first step would be to experiment with a limited catalog. We started with 500 songs as the cap for the potential integration. Since we were working with a limited catalog, the interface needed to be restructured in such a way that users don’t realize they’re missing the search feature. This was particularly challenging, as Spotify’s product is a search-optimized interface. With popular song features, exclusive Snapchat playlists, and a tactful UI solution, having a search-less solution looks and feels natural in the updated solution.
The final challenge was designing the artist attribution tags. Artist attribution needs to be preserved for legal reasons, but while the first prototypes featured attribution tags with a large amount of exposure for the artists, some feedback I got was to work on an attribution tag wouldn’t feel as foreign to Snapchat’s platform. I decided on a black overlay from the bottom of the screen as Snapchat users are accustomed to filters coming from the bottom of the screen, and also making it easier for them to discover music their friends are listening to and and play or add it to their Spotify playlists.
After the time the first version was presented and my internship over, Snapchat revamped their UI, so design solutions needed to be adjusted accordingly. Below is an updated concept for what the integration could look like under the same constraints.
