Rethinking royalty advances
I work as a product designer at Amuse and today we are launching the latest version of ‘Fast Forward’. It is the next generation of royalty advances for all successful artists — big and small. It comes with a new look and feel, as well as major improvements under the hood. In this text I will guide you through the design, and the primary design decisions we took.
First, a little bit of background. Advances are a big part of the music industry. Record deals have turned into a race for artists to score as high advance as possible, and for most artists that is the only payment that they ever receive for their music. Advances are historically large sums given to very few artists. The main problem for almost all artists is cash flow. It’s a catch-22 where you earn money by releasing new music, but you need money to record and promote music.
We like to do things a bit different at Amuse. We believe that more artists should be able to unlock their royalties earlier so that they can re-invest in their music. That will help artists make more money in the end. Last year Amuse released Fast Forward — the world’s first automatic royalty advance at scale. It’s entirely based on the data that flows through our digital music distribution service (that let independent artists and their teams, self-release music to streaming services and social media) — where it predicts future royalties and offer it today. The advances can be as low as $50 and as big as $300 000, a range made possible by the fact that Fast Forward is data-driven instead of run by human accountants as most other avance services.
Before we talk about the design, I have to mention the tech. The major update that is pushed to the apps today means that everything has been rebuilt from the ground up. The technology is faster, and even more accurate in its prediction. Making it the most powerful in the game. We now give daily offers based on more data points and stream sources than before. With the introduction of royalty splits earlier this year, even more people can now be offered advances, from producers to songwriters to managers. Fast Forward has now matured into a core part of the Amuse product. For reference, below are some screenshots from the previous version.
Up until now, you have only been able to withdraw money from our mobile apps. That changes today with the launch of our new Wallet on all our platforms (Android, iPhone and Web). It’s a new way to withdraw money: just click the withdraw button and it’s done! We listened to user feedback — and looked at the behaviour data — so the monthly statement is now bundled per release instead of tracks. Click to expand, and see songs or earnings per music stores. The primary focus for all of our users is the last payout. So now only the previous month is detailed directly on your Wallet, with last monthly payouts bundled below.
Royalty advances are now fully integrated into the main product, with a new simplified interface. This is the thing we are most proud of in the product design team. When we launched Fast Forward last year, we deemed it necessary to separate it from your balance. Now the product is mature enough to be a natural part of the amount available — so that our users always know what options they have right now. The new withdraw box changes depending on what’s available to you: withdraw the balance or take an advance. Totally up to you.
If you chose to take an advance, you would enter recoup-mode. To recoup means to pay back the advance — this is done 100% in the app, and only your streaming royalties goes to paying back. Instead of showing users a big negative balance, we wanted something more positive. Recoup is now visualised as a progress bar. You still earn 100% of your royalties while recouping. As soon as you complete the progress bar, everything is back to normal. An excellent way to make the progress bar fill faster is to release new music and have those royalties go to your recoup.
The design team have looked extensively at communication in the apps. It is imperative to tell users what is happening — both when something goes wrong and when everything works as intended. System messages can often feel dull or impersonal. We want our brand, and our products to feel as vibrant as the music we put out, so we introduced a new way to talk with our users — with a lot of emojis.
We explored a lot of different design solutions before we ended up with the final design. To make something feel obvious and natural takes time and hard work. Early on we toyed with putting your all-time earnings at the top. The thinking was that it would be nice to have a big number at the top, that increases for every month. We ultimately scrapped it (or rather put it at the bottom of the screen) so that the only amount you see is money you can withdraw. The withdraw box moved around many times before ending up at the very top. It all cam down to hierarchy — to give attention the most important thing on the screen at all time.
Looking into the future, we are hard at work to tweak the algorithm so that even more artists are to be offered royalty advances. We will add more ways to withdraw your money. We will be launching some fascinating Pro features for the Wallet soon, with even more details and data. The future is bright, look (fast) forward to it.
→ Have a little click around on this prototype
Thank you for reading. Please update the Amuse app and give the new wallet a spin. What do you think of the new design?
My name is Nils Sköld and I’m the Design Lead at Amuse. Major labels take huge cuts from their artists, and distribution services usually charge you per release and take a cut of your royalties. Our distribution is free, as in no fees, and no cuts. For artists that want more we offer a subscription services called “Amuse Pro”. We also run an artist-friendly record label. Please read more at amuse.io
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