Why we (finally) built a web app
The world’s first mobile record label goes desktop
When Amuse launched two and a half years ago, we were the very first mobile record company, charting completely new ground in the music industry with the added opportunity to be signed based on data-tracking hit potential. Since then we’ve used the term “The world’s first mobile record label” to a great extent when marketing ourselves.
The problem
We had managed to differentiate ourselves from our competitors by offering our users to release music on-the-go, but eventually, our users were missing the convenience of using a laptop, where they have all their working files and final assets.
In a survey sent to our users where we asked what features they wanted to see in our products, 43% answered that they wanted a web service in order to be able to upload music from their laptop. This was also a common request we got in user interviews, and we’ve seen that especially more professional artists prefer to work from their computers.
Amuse was founded on the ambition to relieve the artist community of classic music industry pain points. As our user community grew, we realized that although releasing music through our mobile app is very easy, the majority of people still create and finalize their music on a computer. Also, the amount of managers using Amuse to work with multiple artists has been increasing steadily since our launch. In other words, the opportunity to release music directly on desktop would simplify the process notably for a lot of users.
From a UX perspective, it’s important to know your user and their needs. Mobile apps have gotten known for being easy to use, but for a music producer working all day in front of a 27” desktop computer using their phone mainly for artist communication, it might not be.
It was time to build a web app.
The process
The idea of building a web app was first discussed in a funnel hack workshop. In the workshop, we looked at the steps our users had to go through to create a release and tried to come up with quick ways to remove friction so that as many artists as possible would be able to release music through Amuse. But what started out as a hack, quickly developed into one of the bigger focus points for the product org at Amuse.
First, the hack became an MVP, which in the end boiled down to a service where you could release your music, but nothing else. Uploading the actual release is the most tedious part of releasing music, so it made sense to start here. Everything else was easily done through the mobile apps. We quickly discarded more advanced features and decided to release in stages. The MVP would be a so-called release builder, and we would continue to add on to our beta product throughout the year.
In three months we had launched a fully functioning MVP. It quickly became our most used platform for creating releases, while our mobile apps still work as a great addition to the web service where our users can go to get detailed statistics and payout details on a daily basis.
Once the MVP was launched in beta, we continued to iterate on the product and added a music tab to give our users the opportunity to see the status of a release and keep track of their catalog.
Next steps
When looking at how we should continue to develop the web app, it has become apparent that it’s important to frame a successful upload as the start of a release, rather than a finished process. According to Spotify themselves, nearly 40 000 tracks are uploaded to their platform every day. This makes promotion and fan engagement key factors to any artist’s success. If we can create a sense of excitement after a successful upload, it’s more likely that the artist will channel that feeling into their network and release plan.
We are also continuing to build new features for our web app, but instead of aiming for feature parity, we want to build platform-specific features based on how we think the features will perform on web versus mobile. We see our web app together with our mobile apps as a part of an eco-system that should complement each other.
Personal reflections:
Although still ongoing, this was a very amusing project to work on. Partly because it’s fun to create something from scratch and set a system that we will continue to build upon for a long time. But also because it was nice to get some variation from mobile, you have more space to work with so you can be somewhat more playful when it comes to text and image sizes.
I hadn’t worked at Amuse for that long when we first held the funnel hack workshop where the idea of the web app sparked. From a personal perspective, I don’t remember finding it strange that Amuse was mobile-only, I actually found it quite bold when I started.
For years the startup industry had been talking about mobile-first, and what Amuse did by starting out mobile-only was not only bold but also quite courageous, especially within the somewhat lagging-behind music industry.
What I was contemplated by, was that a web service was not prioritized higher once it was discussed. So it’s extra fun seeing that what started out as a hack with a somewhat low priority, now is a huge part of our product roster.
–
My name is Evy Lybeck and I work as a product designer at Amuse. If you’d like to try our web app to release your music for free — go to artist.amuse.io to get started.
Amuse is a new kind of record label giving free distribution to all artists. 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. We use listening data to better determine what artists to sign to our record label. That’s how we make money. Please read more at amuse.io
