Spotify: Design goal VS Business goal?
As all of us are quarantined at home, music becomes a necessity for people. This week, we critiqued one of the most popular music-streaming applications — Spotify, which dominated 36% market share of the music-streaming subs in 2019. How could it be so popular? Does it meet all users’ needs? Come and explore with us!
Part 01: Basic information about Spotify
Business model: simply speaking, Spotify is a freemium service, meaning that basic features are free with advertisements, while additional features, including improved streaming quality and offline music downloads, are offered via paid subscriptions.
Target users: Confirming what was found above, we see that Spotify has the most youthful user base compared to Apple Music and Pandora.
Part 02: When design goals fight with business goals
From the design perspective, in the 2019 financial report, among 248m monthly active users (MAUs), 113m are premium subscribers and 135m are non-premium subscribers. Moreover, the percentage of premium subscribers are static or even declining. From the data, we could clearly see that, in order to bring most users a better experience, non-premium users’ experience becomes more and more important in Spotify.
However, from the business perspective, 90% +of the revenue in Spotify comes from premium subscribers even if the percentage of advertisement income has increased over the years. It seems reasonable to focus a lot more to keep them as premium users and encourage more users to subscribe as premium users.
In order to design the experience that could bring more users with a better experience as well as maintaining the growth in business, the key conflict here is —
How much effort should Spotify put on non-premium users?
🤔 My thinkings: It might be better if Spotify pushes more on enhancing non-premium users' experience. From the business side, we could see the portion of revenue from ads is increasing since 2012. It is at least reasonable to conclude that ad-supported model is a profitable and acceptable business model for both users and companies. Moreover, all users are non-premium users before they become premium users. Giving everyone a better experience at the first stage would be a wiser choice to build emotional connection and loyalty on the platform.
Part 03: Current experience of non-premium users
In the discussion, we explored deeper to know more about the current experience of non-premium users and figured out some opportunities.
Our main conclusion: Spotify has figured out some nice features in balancing non-premium and premium users’ experience. However, the experience for non-premium users still can be improved by indicating what the premium unlocked features would look like.
- Finding 01: confusing interfaces impair users’ experience
When users search for a certain song to play, Spotify will automatically play the first song of the playlist but not the searched one for non-premium users, even they are still on the page of the search result. The feature provides users with an unexpected outcome without even a single notification.
Not only would users feel super confused about the inconsistent interface, but it’s also hard for them to realize that the “mistake” would be corrected once they become premium users. However, it should have been a clever moment to notify them of the benefits of being premium users.
Improvement: There could be a notification popped up or shown on the page when users click the “play” button on the searched results as an indicator. The notification could be a short explanation about the inconsistency and can be linked with the premium subscription page, on which users would be told they can hear what they search once they become premium users.
Finding 02. preview lists — a special feature for non-premium users
Another interesting feature that Spotify designed is the preview page for non-premium users. Non-premium users cannot get access to each song freely, so Spotify designed a preview list as a substitute to help users self-define the playlist to some extent. However, the preview list page is quite hidden. It is hard to be found on the playlist page.
The playlist preview feature is a nice feature that balances the discrepancy between non-premium and premium users. However, how would users know what the interface would be like in premium accounts without any clues?
Improvements: It seems obvious that short explanations and visual indicators could be useful in informing users. However, you don’t want them to be too much of a burden or interruption to user experience either. I believe that excluding notifications and adding a short clickable explanation would be a well-balanced choice here.
Part5. Some other takeaways
- Download feature. The whole album would be downloaded once clicking the download button on a list. It might be overwhelming for users if they only want to download some songs in the list, which would be a more typical scenario especially when users search for songs they like.
- The balance on the information. Users would have multiple lists of recommendations based on their listening histories, personal interests… However, how many people would really scroll down to the bottom to view all the lists? Would it motivate users to ‘cherish’ these lists more if only limited numbers of lists are provided?
- New feature: the scan code. We found that users could share scannable codes with others. Songs shared by premium users could be available for non-premium users as well. However, the feature is not emphasized in the application. It is hard to notice the QR code and it is not intuitive on the interfaces that how and where users can use the QR code.
Next APP — Zoom
In the coming week, we are going to have another application critique — Zoom, the most welcomed application for students:) See you👋
