Introduction

I remember getting an iPod touch in 2008. At the time, at age 14, the biggest songs in my life were Viva La Vida by Coldplay after it spent the summer pouring out of car speakers, I’m Shipping up to Boston by the Dropkick Murphy’s which had reached ubiquity in New England for Boston sports fans and received national attention after it soundtracked Martin Scorsese’s Boston crime drama, The Departed, and any song that appeared on the video game Rock Band. My taste was the product of circumstance until I received a device that gave me the opportunity to start seeking out music that I connected with and store it to listen to whenever I wanted, a 2nd generation iPod Touch. The only songs I had access to were a small library of mp3s on my family computer, built by older siblings through Napster. I sat and listened to each song as if it were auditioning for a spot on my iPod. Some songs made me feel cool, some I felt were boring, but no matter how many songs I eventually saved for my iPod, I loved the process of exploring these songs.

I began looking beyond the limited selection of songs stored on my computer and went to the internet. Years prior, I would have had to buy each of these songs on iTunes in order to listen to them, but my interest in music came at a time when music fans all over the world were making lyric videos for their favorite songs and uploading them to YouTube for people to watch and listen for free. I felt like I had just opened up a new world to discover in which the compass was my curiosity and tastes. There was no pressure pushing me towards listening to certain songs, and there was no limit to the ways in which I could find new music. I discovered that almost every artist had a Wikipedia page for their discography, documenting which albums and singles had charted highly, providing a starting point for my listening given an artist I liked. I consistently found new songs from the related videos section on YouTube, the comments section on the videos, or by searching the discographies of the artists featured on the songs I liked. Eventually I would find music journalism sites like Pitchfork that shared my tastes and opened me up to further discovery.

I loved the way I found music. I felt a sense of identity with each song I discovered and a sense of community when I found that other people liked a song too. I developed trust with the opinions of certain sites and my tastes expanded into genres I never thought I’d come to enjoy. I came to see the way I discovered and cultivated tastes as a product of a unique moment in time, when all of the music was available for immediate listening so long as you were looking for it. While I did most of my listening on YouTube, the website did next to nothing to curate my listening experience other than providing similar videos or by allowing people to post comments that might pique my interest.

I recognized that this wasn’t the best experience possible though. Sometimes I felt like I had to search particularly hard in order to find the actual song I wanted if it wasn’t on YouTube. In order to listen to music on the go or to store it for later listening, I had to either pay for the song on iTunes or (gasp!) engage in the frowned upon practice of using a YouTube-to-MP3 downloader to get the songs I wanted. I didn’t want to have to fork up $0.99 or spend ten minutes downloading and organizing a song in my iTunes library. When traveling, I had to plan ahead for all of the music I might want to hear, unable to discover new songs on the go.

I remember years ago going on Facebook to see that some of my friends were listening to music through a web app for something called Spotify. This was the first time I had ever heard of a music streaming service, but I hoped it may be able to provide the experience that I was looking for. In the years since, after using a variety of music streaming services, I have yet to find one that provides the kind of music listening and discovery experience that makes me feel the way I did when I got my first iPod.

The rise of music streaming services has revitalized the music industry by allowing listeners to access millions of songs instantly on their mobile device, typically by subscribing to the service for a monthly fee. With the subscription model providing access to all songs in the catalogue of a streaming service, rather than as an a la carte purchase, listeners have the ability to explore music without having to weigh competing needs when they click play. With no cost to listening, other than one’s time, listeners no longer have to read album reviews, pay attention to singles that promote an album, limit themselves to 90 second previews from the iTunes store, or seek out the best advice on what to listen to from their friends. This isn’t inherently good or bad, but it does theoretically provide listeners with the opportunity to listen to new music and judge it based not on how much it cost or what others said about it, but how it makes them feel when they listen to it.

The freedom to listen to almost any song instantly at no additional cost should make listeners feel empowered to explore new music. However, what I have found in my experience with music streaming applications is that they fail to consider how a user like me might feel when opening the app, showing a host of playlists, features, and a sense of faux personalization. I like to explore music myself, and it feels like an experience is pushed on me that I don’t want. To me, having the option to choose between my path is what’s most important as it allows me to act upon the feeling that led me to open the app in the first place.

When I use streaming services to discover new music, I find the pages designed for exploration often constrict my possibilities within a catalogue of millions of songs. What I want to feel from a discover page is to feel like I've been given the keys to a new car with a full tank of gas and a whole country to explore – here I feel like I’m picking one of several traincars to ride around the same city as everyone else.

While music streaming services, in my opinion, struggle to provide an immersive and imaginative experience for exploring new music, they also tend to be unsuccessful in their ability to provide listeners with the comforting and identity-centric experience of returning to their favorites. Because listeners don’t need to acquire a song in order to listen to it on demand as they did with digital downloads or physical purchases, there is no force driving listeners to build a personal library as used to occur as a byproduct of the economics of physical and digital marketplaces. Instead, with every song, playlist, or album heard, listeners have to make a decision whether or not they want to return to it. In the physical space, this is akin to listening through a song or album at a record store and having to decide whether to set that album down or bring it home to sit on a bookshelf, recognizing it as part of one’s personal library. On music streaming platforms, the menu of options for a piece of music often include seemingly redundant choices that don't make it clear how is the best way to save a song, be it in a playlist, in a collection, or in a library.

The way in which we decide to return to a song, album, or playlist can vary categorically, yet music streaming services don’t let listeners save songs, albums, or playlists categorically. For example, a listener may connect some music as what they would call, “nighttime driving music.” Given the way streaming services have designed their apps, listeners could get close to categorically saving the music they consider, “nighttime driving music,” by creating a playlist in which they can put all of the songs, songs of the albums, and songs of the playlists that they feel belongs in this category. What the user has at the end is a long list of songs that is unorganized, making it difficult for a listener to make a listening decision when they go driving at night. If streaming services instead allowed users to save their music in ways that they categorically think about their music, the result would be a more intuitive, less frustrating experience.

The goal of any user of a music streaming service is to arrive at music to listen to. There are many decisions that users make in their heads when they select what they will listen to, be it conscious or not. The job of the music streaming application is to facilitate this emotional journey by understanding the considerations listeners are making in their head and allowing them to manifest in use of the app. On the whole, what music streaming services have done is overwhelm users with pages that fail to consider what certain listener behaviors, struggle to provide creative options to explore music, and offer the bare minimum in design of the personal library.

Streaming service applications can, and should do much better by considering the app from the perspective of a music listener. What follows is a proposed version of a music streaming service that seeks to provide listeners with the ability to explore music, engage with listeners, and return to favorites in intuitive, natural, and engaging ways.

Welcome to Spacecraft

Our visualizations often affect our decision making, and this is especially true in regards to how we engage with music. Before music was made available digitally, selecting something to listen to meant visualizing behaviors in a physical space, be it picking out a record and putting it on the turntable or going to the stereo and selecting a radio station. If someone were to visualize all of the recorded music in the world, a warehouse of albums stacked to the ceiling might come to mind.

As music has moved to the digital space, it has been presented to users in lists and tiles, organized in space next to each other. Visualizing all of the recorded music in a music streaming app would likely be a seemingly endless list of songs to tap on, sorted alphabetically. To visualize music in this way makes the idea of a song feel static and the relationships between songs feel arbitrary. This visualization of music directly affects the ways in which people think and feel about music in an uninspiring and stale manner.

An opportunity exists to create an interface that allows music fans to feel that there is an entire universe of music out there to explore, as if each song, album, or playlist is its own planet for discovery with its own climate and atmosphere. In order for users to feel that there is a universe of music rather than a seemingly endless catalogue of songs, I’ve decided to adopt an outer-space design for the application. The goal here is to make music discovery feel like soaring across the galaxy and landing on planets.

Welcome to Spacecraft.

Preparing for Launch

At present, Spacecraft is the ideas and concepts presented here for how a music streaming service could be more than just a place to listen to music. If this were to be carried forward, there is a lot to be developed, including figuring out how to make a pun related to crate digging and a crater.

What music streaming services have done so far to breathe life back into the music industry says a lot about how well they meet the needs of consumers that had not been met before. The hope isn't necessarily for Spacecraft to be produced as a replacement for those platforms, but does beg the question of whether users should be treated as one uniform set of people. Perhaps among music fans there is a subset who is more passionate about how they discover their music, the community they form around it, and how they identify with it, for whom a service such as Spacecraft would better suit their needs. For a time, music streaming services competed based on whether they had exclusive content. It's possible that a streaming company could find a new lane by rejecting a 'one size fits all' approach and instead create a product line of various applications that have different features and are offered at different price points.

Ultimately, Spacecraft serves to help move the conversation forward about how those who design music streaming services might consider the possibilities to create a truly compelling experience. Given how much time and consideration an artist puts into their records to make it a meaningful experience to listeners, it's up to the streaming services to try to achieve the same in how they allow music fans to explore and listen to music.