The way we listen to our favorite songs completely changed with streaming services like Youtube, Spotify, and Apple music. With all these apps consolidating all of the songs we love in one place, why not make sharing and discussing them just as easy?
While most of us use streaming apps like Spotify every day, we each have all sorts of different ways to share our new favorite songs with our friends. I personally have GroupMe's with a few friends where we share and talk about new music. While this method works, I feel this is a huge opportunity that Spotify and other music streaming apps miss out by not allowing users to share and discuss music easily within the app.
Through my research, I found that almost all of my friends and peers at U.Va do have some sort of group or method for sharing music. Through a quick survey on our class FB page, I found for sharing music with friends, most people sent music through text or IM groups such as Facebook messenger, Instagram direct messages, and GroupMe. Over 90% of my peers felt that music introduced to them by their friends was better than suggestions from Youtube or Spotify.
This quote I found from a GQ article sums up my findings nicely:
"Occasionally I let the robots tell me what to hear, most often SoundCloud autoplay after I’ve been listening to something I like, or a peek at Spotify’s Discover Weekly. I prefer humans, obviously."
- Jillian Mapes, Pitchfork Senior Editor
1. The social factor: Humans love sharing! Whether it be their lunch, pet photos, or what must be the most amazing sunset ever (it's not btw but hey I'm guilty of it too). Almost all of my participants said they share music with their friends in some manner.
2. It's a mess out there: Participants shared music through all sorts of different mediums such as Google Drive (not sure the legality of this but ok lol), text message, GroupMe, Facebook messenger, DropBox, etc.
3. It's annoying: Many participants felt sharing music was a hassle as they had to copy links from the app and couldn't listen to their friends suggestions cross-platform.
Introducing Spotify Groups! This is a concept I'm currently pursuing which would act as a group/direct messaging feature. Users can send songs, playlists, discuss Lil Wayne's latest album, etc. all within the Spotify application.
Instantly share any song within Spotify's library.
Click "share with group" to choose which group to send to.
Pick the who you want to share with.
Write a message and send to your friends.
I'm currently in the process of further developing and testing my prototype as it will certainly need further design and exploration. I will be posting a more in-depth look at my initial design and research as well. Stay tuned.
