Coming soon…
Spotify x Samsung Music
Spotify teamed up with Samsung Music to bridge the gap between local-file listening and frictionless streaming on Samsung devices.
Case Study
Time: 3 Months
Team: App Integrations
Role: Product Design Lead
Samsung Music is the company’s first-party music player for local files (MP3s). It’s popular in countries where streaming services aren’t yet widely adopted.
There are many places in the world where Spotify isn’t a known brand, but local songs and artists are. As Spotify expands to new markets it can appeal to users by showing them content they’ll love.
Now Playing
A screenshot of Spotify’s “Now Playing” view shared on Instagram Stories.
Problem
Music discovery is an important part of the Spotify experience. We encourage discovery through content personalization: custom playlists, song recommendations, and similar artist suggestions.
In fact, Spotify’s personalization is one of its top-selling features and a competitive advantage - the more effort users put into personalizing their music experience through listening, liking songs, and following artists, the less likely they are to abandon it.
But we can’t provide personalized recommendations until a user interacts with Spotify. This leaves us with the following problem: How can we communicate the strengths of Spotify’s personalization and recommendation tools to users before they’ve engaged with our service?
Partnering with Samsung Music gives us the opportunity to apply our music analyzation tools to a person’s Samsung Music library to provide personalized streaming recommendations from Spotify.
Mission Statement
Encourage people to discover new music by showing them something they’ll love.
Goals
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Introduce Spotify to new audiences - don’t say we have your favorite artists, show them - encourage discovery and show them the breadth of Spotify’s catalog with songs from the artist that they may not know about - important as we expand to international markets because there are many places where the Spotify brand is not familiar, but albums and artists are.
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Communicate the power of Spotify’s personalization and recommendation tools.
Music Identity
Sketches from the team’s brainstorming session explored ways for users to express their “Music Identity” through Stories.
Exploration
For Bixby Home, we created a Top Charts card to show locally trending music. For our integration with Samsung Music we expand on Top Charts, with New Releases, and Popular Playlists.
We can take this one step further with personalized content. We developed an anonymous recommendation feature that can look at a user’s music library and recommend albums and playlists with similar content. Love an artist? Complete your collection by listening to her other tracks on Spotify or discover new artists you’ll enjoy.
Story View
Viewers can tap the link at the top of the Story to listen to the song on Spotify.
In a sense, this and Bixby Top Charts card are glorified banner ads. But we focus on providing value to the user. We do this by focusing on user needs - we meet fans where they are to deliver meaningful music experiences at the right moment, in the right format. We don’t just say “Spotify has all your favorite music,” we show them music they’ll love from their favorite artists. Our integrations can take many forms, but the approach follows the same principles:
Appeal
Educate
Create Habits < > Drive Engagement
Upsell
Appeal
I explored different executions to visualize a listener’s “Now Playing” status. AR lenses made a return in the form of headphones with music notes and song info animating above the user’s head. Other filters featured Spotify playlist branding, with song info replacing playlist titles.
Appeal
Our integrations introduce Spotify at a moment where we can naturally provide value to the user. For Samsung Music, we use empty states as opportunities to show users music they’ll love.
Educate
The feature was announced on stage at F8 in May 2018.
Educate
We built anonymous recommendations to show the power of Spotify’s personalization tools. Even non-Spotify users can receive relevant content based on their local music files. So if you have MP3s on your phone we can feed that into album and playlist recommendations.
Create Habits
The Share to Instagram Stories user flow.
Create Habits
Create Habits & Drive Engagement - We reduce friction to drive continued usage of Spotify within partner apps. We show search results from Spotify when a user has no results in their personal library. Tapping a result opens the content in Spotify.
Upsell. Spotify supports both Free and Premium users, and integrations must benefit both. Free users can listen to albums and playlists on Spotify in shuffle mode, and Premium users can choose individual songs for playback.
Upsell
Spotify supports both Free and Premium users, and integrations must benefit both. Free users can listen to albums and playlists on Spotify in shuffle mode, and Premium users can choose individual songs for playback.
Impact
The Samsung Music integration creates acquisition channels for new Spotify users in Samsung Music’s top markets: Korea, US, Germany, Turkey, Russia and India. Korea and India are especially important as Spotify expands into Asia. There are many places in the world where Spotify is not yet a known brand, but album names and artist names are.
The three integrations drive over 300K registrations with 200K coming from Samsung Music. For comparison, share to Instagram Stories generated 125K registrations. Estimate 500K Regs from Samsung Music.
The success of the first phase of the partnership has proven the power of Spotify’s contextual recommendations. We understand music and sometimes we understand the user’s music tastes better than they do themselves. Instead of telling users how amazing our recommendations and catalog are, we just show them.
Improvements
The team is exploring ways to add 30 second previews to drive conversions of non-Spotify users in Samsung Music.
Next step to add value is take them to 30 sec song preview before asking to download app. We have to get record label approval for 30 sec previews which can slow down or sometimes block development, so in this case, we wanted to see how it performed before seeking approval.
Next Steps
Artists like Selena Gomez and Charlie Puth are using the feature to engage with their followers.
Next Steps
The integration with Facebook Stories features improvements like audio clips and a more noticeable Spotify playback link. Future iterations of the feature could leverage Canvas to create stronger visual Stories that utilize the strengths of the platform.
People aren’t just using Spotify because they can stream on-demand, they’re using it as a new form of radio – a playlist-driven experience that caters to just what you like. That’s not something that’s easily copied, either, for rival services without as much data to access or technology under the hood to make sense of it.
— Sarah Perez, TechCrunch
Animated Prototypes
I created prototypes to show how users could share their music habits with compelling Stories.