Challenge

Young creatives often get their start posting music on free platforms, such as SoundCloud and YouTube. It's a daunting task for small artists and labels to go "legit" and monetize their work on streaming services like Spotify, Apple Music, iTunes and Deezer. It means crafting the right metadata for every platform's unique requirements. It means wrangling multiple upload and tagging flows, dealing with multiple billing and income sources, and managing the release of their music in several places at once. And once their music is live, analytics such as streams and earnings are split between every unique platform.

In short: releasing music requires time and expertise that many artists simply don't have.

Solution

I worked closely with my client to develop the Audio Ember platform, a powerful tool that allows artists and labels to upload their music once and control the release to dozens of streaming and e-commerce platforms. I co-created Audio Ember's brand identity and developed a design system for their platform. I performed user interviews with artists and industry experts to identify major pain points for artists distributing music to popular platforms. I scoped, sketched, and produced high-fidelity interactive mockups of the Audio Ember platform, developing an intuitive upload flow that handles everything from track names to lyrics, to release management and revenue sharing. In one web experience, customers can control the wide release of their music and build highly-custom, detailed analytics dashboards that combine data from all release platforms.

Result

After an eight-month design period, Audio Ember contracted the development of their platform to an external engineering team. I worked closely with the developers for an additional four months to see the project to completion. The service has since launched to great success, where Audio Ember continues to change the way music is distributed with a focus on accessibility, customer success, and self-service.