Spotify was created in 2006 and is one of the largest music streaming services worldwide. Spotify has around 380 million monthly users globally, with most users subscribed to its premium service which allows for the download of music and an advertisemnt free service. Spotify's design features bold typography, vibrant and bright colours, and simple icons. The app has user recommendations, playlists, and unique features, such as shared playlists collaborative playlists and Spotify Jam (which allows users to listen to music at the same time). Spotify makes it easy for users to explore new music, create playlists, and find artists. Also, the bright green colour of the logo and the details in the app allow it to stand out from others.
Apple Music was launched in 2015 by Apple and has also a worldwide user base. , it is estimated t that the app has over 80 million paid subscribers. this music app design follows Apple's signature aesthetic, which focuses on elegance, simplicity, and cohesiveness across Apple devices. The app features subtle animations, typography, and the design language of Apple Inc. Apple Music offers exclusive content, live radio stations, and immersive experiences like music videos and artist interviews
To get a perspective on the Apple Music app I used it for a couple of days during the week, firstly I used simple music, the pros of this application are the exclusive content that the app provides for the users, I also like when you were listening to the music that the lyrics can pop up and it covers the whole screen like a karaoke set, but also the album cover being presented when you want it to, I also like how the background changes to match the album cover colours. Over all, I liked Apple Music but when using Spotify regularly I would stick with Spotify as it creates recommendations for what kinds of music you would like and over all I think the navigation and experience for the user if the UI is more seamless and exciting for the users especially Spotify wrapped, the ai DJ and the artist rank in the world, shuffle songs, personalised playlist and different mixes eg night time mix and moody mix.
I created a mindmap that was generally around music and explored many different areas that I can have in my app. I wanted to have an idea that would draw the user to my application. when looking at the mindmap and my experiences I noticed that many of the fans have no areas where they can interact and find new fans of the same artist. I thought that this was a good idea was the users would be able to make new friendships and compare and find new knowledge about a specific artist. I like this idea as it is not done by many companies must just to play music but I wanted this to be a selling point for my brand. there are many different artists with millions of fans so there would be an opening in the market for this kind of app, I also want to explore an area where users can have a live chat box where they can discuss the artist and new releases when they are released, I also want to have an area for concerts and upcoming concerts and to make it unique I want users to be able to upload their concert footage.
After analysing the different music apps I created some initial ideas to get ideas down on paper which allowed me to experiment with different fun layouts and allowed my designs to become more unique and creative rather than unoriginal. When I was making these designs I came up with the idea of creating a community page where users can find fans of the same artists and communicate with each other sharing interests and concert videos. I also came up with many other ideas such as a live chat, karaoke, info bubble on the song, song of the week and artist of the week, and statistics of listening.
These are my final designs for my music app, which included a Home page, Now Listening Page, Community page, library page and artist page. I used a combination of squares and circles to present this information and added a curve to the points of the squares so it was less harsh. The album covers were square and the artists were in circle frames it allows the user to differentiate these across each of the pages and understand what they are looking at.
