I listen to a wide variety of music these days, but have very little idea of what I actually like.
Back when I used to buy physical albums, I had a much stronger bond with the content:
The digital, subscription-based model has transformed how I listen to music, but in many ways has made the entire experience less personal and less meaningful. I have a music library that is borderline unmanageable, due to the sheer amount of content in it. I can only identify my absolute favourite music. The rest blurs together into one unidentifiable group that comprises stuff that I actually like, but don’t know well enough to remember; stuff that I don’t like, but didn’t delete and stuff that I haven’t listened to, would like to, but can't tell apart from the rest.
Here is a potential solution that could go some way to helping...
1. Gather stats about what I listen to (which you must already have and therefore probably know more about what music I like than I do) and what I like
2. Present these stats to me throughout Spotify so that I can more clearly see what I listen to and like
3. Create views that give me additional insights and that enable me to access the content more quickly in the future
Scenarios – play count displayed throughout Spotify
Scenarios – rating displayed throughout Spotify
Scenarios – additional views
Ideally, these would be visualised in a super-simple way that can be intuitively manipulate. In addition, the most interesting ones could be created by Spotify and presented beautifully – infographics?
I've created some example screens that show how my personal play count could be surfaced throughout the iOS version. I realise that it messes with the elegance of the design a little, but I'm sure you guys can come up with a much better way of pulling it off than what I've churned out. Besides, the exercise was more about demonstrating that the updated screens have far greater relevance to me (making it feel more personal) and assist significantly in highlighting to me what I actually like.
Album view in “Your Music” now displays the total number of plays for every track in the album. This immediately gives the user a sense of which albums on the list are their favourites. I would suggest that of all places to add play count, this is the most useful. This list now has much more relevance to the user than before.
It also enables them to quickly identify new albums they have added, but haven’t had the time to listen to.
Finally, it enables them to spot which albums they might want to consider deleting, that have had very few listens – perhaps they give it a go, don’t like it, stop, then forget about it.
Selecting an album reveals the track list, with the total number of plays summarised in a similar fashion to the previous screen.
Again, the user can immediately find the tracks that they have listen to the most.
Scrolling up takes the user to the larger album view.
Total play count for all tracks in the album has been added directly beneath the album title, reinforcing the information from the previous screen.
In addition, “shuffle play” has been replaced with a link to the artist page – why would someone want to shuffle an album that has been specifically organised by the artist? If they do want to, they can immediately hit shuffle from the main controls.
The artist page has been tweaked to add the total play count for all tracks by the artist directly beneath the artist name.
“Shuffle Play” has also been removed here, as it feels totally redundant. Admittedly, I don’t have the telemetry data for that button, but my gut tells me that few people would use it here when they would be shuffling every possible song by an artist. As a result, “follow/following” has replaced it.
Scrolling down, the user can immediately see the total play count per album.
Selecting an album, results in a view that more closely matches the album view from “Your Music”.
“Save / saved” was added, as it not only unified the two pages, but it felt like an important action at this point. After all, this is where users will browse for new albums from an artist.
Updated on 2021-07-16
Hey everyone,
Thanks for coming to the Spotify Idea Exchange.
We've discussed this idea and while it is interesting, we don't have any immediate plans to implement this.
Note that with initiatives like Wrapped and Only you we will be giving a sneak peak on the unique ways of how everyone uses Spotify.
If we do have any new information to share, rest assured we'll check back in here with a new status.
More info on why your idea has been closed can be found here.