For the love of Music, Sharing and UI— Case study about Soundcloud

6 min readSep 13, 2020

Scope of the Project

As part of a UI exercise, I was asked to introduce a new feature into the Soundcloud app that would allow artists to get booked to private parties, or small events, due to covid restrictions and clubs closings.

The objective of this project was for the final solution to be seamless and really blend into the actual design of the Soundcloud Android app.

Why Soundcloud ?

For this new feature challenge, I chose to work on the Soundcloud app for a very simple reason. I’m a faithful user of Soundcloud for more than 6 years now and wouldn’t shift to another music streaming platform, considering it’s the only platform which allows me to discover, everyday, new, independent, emerging artists that can only share their music thanks to Soundcloud.

Who are you Soundcloud ?

First, I did some secondary research and tried to understand the brand values, and what makes SC stand out from its competitors.

When we think about music streaming platforms, we think of course about Spotify or Apple music which have become dominant because most digital consumption of music worldwide now takes place via the “mainstream” streaming services, in negotiated partnership with rights owners, mainly the majords. (SoundCloud and Bandcamp as Alternative Music Platforms, David Hesmondhalgh, Ellis Jones, Andreas Rauh)

Let’s make a Soundcloud vs Spotify value proposition comparison.

Value proposition comparison — Soundcloud vs Spotify

Because they attract a lot of casual listeners thanks to the instant availability for consumers of huge catalogs of professionally produced music, Spotify benefit the largest number of subscribers. Spotify is great when it comes to the social networking side for example the collaborative playlists or the fact that you can listen to the music of your friends.

However, when it comes to creators, Soundcloud is the winner. Indeed, it is designed to encourage producers, whether they are amateurs, or semi-professionals, to upload content easily without the need of an intermediary (major or any kind of distributor).

As the world’s largest music platform (nearly 200 million people access the platform every month), SoundCloud makes it possible for artists to connect directly with their fans, people who are actually seeking for their music, in the whole world. In that sense, Soundcloud is a producer-oriented platform.

Talking about the Soundcloud Users …

After doing some research online and doing some short interviews with users of the Soundcloud app, I managed to categorize them in 2 profiles, as follows.

The producers, because they get offered the possibility to upload and label their music easily, and a means by which they can find audiences without necessarily working alongside major and independent recording and publishing companies. They can put their work at the right place and get it heard by their chosen market.
The sound-diggers. People who are looking for niche music, unique content that they don’t find on other music streaming platforms.

Because I find myself to be in the latter, I decided to focus on the artists for my design, so that it doesn’t biaise my research.

Now, here is the persona I’m going to design for.

Alex is an independent artist, whose main goal is to share his music and eventually get paid for that. However, he doesn’t want to work with publishing companies because they simply don’t have the same vision of music. As he said :

“I like music, they like figures.”

He’s also aware that it’s difficult to get known and share his music with the right audience without a proper network, and would easily use a feature that could help him fast-track the distributors.

A Feature that answers Soundcloud User’s Needs and align with their Business Guidelines

In April of this year, Kerry Trainor, Souncloud CEO said :

“Since our founding, SoundCloud’s mission has been to give people the power to share, connect and grow through music.”

In an interview with Forbes in 2019, he also said :

“How it came to be is a pretty natural evolution in that the foundational focus of SoundCloud is on creators, providing them the best tools and the platform to instantly access a global audience.”

Soundcloud wants to help emerging musicians aspiring to greater success, through a global platform for reaching fans with no intermediary.

Well, I take them at their word. Let’s take a step further and actually help their artist users to connect even more with their fans, thanks to this direct booking feature.

The Idea

Reminder : For this project, I need to implement a new feature that would allow artists to get booked to private events, trough the Soundcloud app.

Now that I knew who are the users, and how the feature actually align with Soundcloud’s core mission, I was able to come up with a solution : A direct booking feature, that would allow the artist, in just a few clicks, to get booked by its fans.

Thanks to an ideation session using Worst Idea and Round Robin tools*, I understood something which is at the core of my solution: the need to create engagement between the artist and people that want to book him.

This will take shape through a messaging service, inside the bookings feature. Private messages are something that exists on desktop, but not on the app and which is, to the users I interviewed, missing in the app.

*Worst Idea : Worst Idea is a group technique for idea generation. It asks participants to come up with really bad and silly ideas that would never work. The technique is advantageous as it takes the pressure off participants to come up with brilliant ideas and prevents the suppression of ideas that they may be unsure of or embarrassed about.
*Round Robin : Round Robin is a brainstorming technique that allows team members to generate ideas without being influenced by any other person. You can then take these ideas into the next stages of the problem-solving process.