Spotify Classical

Improving discovery, search and browsing for Spotify’s classical music listeners 🎻 while driving premium subscriptions

Task: Improve discovery and browsing for Spotify’s classical music listeners

Timeline: March – August 2020

Role: Product designer, UX designer, UI designer, Interaction designer, Visual designer, Branding strategy & Graphic Designer

Spotify has a huge library of classical music but browsing and comparing different recordings of the same work has long been frustrating for classical listeners, many of whom have felt like “second-class citizens” on the service.

In this case study, I share how I explored and solved the challenge — developed after extensive user research — of adapting an existing classical streaming service into Spotify Classical, a new multi-platform Spotify app concept.

Results

• Improved experience and increased satisfaction for Spotify’s classical music listeners by 85%

• Task success rates for browsing and discovering classical music were triple for Spotify Classical (92%) versus “regular” Spotify (27%)

• Created an incentive to drive premium subscriptions and new revenue for Spotify — a successful strategy borne out by the launch of Apple Classical in 2023

Here’s how we got there.

1. Context, Goals, & Constraints

2. Understanding the Problem

3. Defining the Problem

4. Potential Solutions

5. Testing the Design

6. Results & Next Steps

7. Key Takeaways

8. Toolstack

Context

Classical music listeners have long complained there is no easy way on Spotify to find, browse or compare different recordings of the same classical work from its enormous library of classical music.

A classical music listener and musician myself, I spent the spring and summer of 2020 as the sole UX researcher and product designer exploring solutions to how Spotify might improve their experience for classical music listeners.

Following weeks of primary and secondary research, I determined the best likely solution for Spotify’s classical listeners — though perhaps not the best business solution — would be:

✅ Spotify acquires, re-brands, and adds new features — like podcasts and live events — to an existing classical streaming service to create a new Spotify app to drive premium subscriptions

🔥 [Update 2023: Turns out this strategy proved eerily accurate. . . except I got the companies wrong. It wasn’t Spotify that bought IDAGIO and created Spotify Classical, but arch-rival Apple Music that bought classical service Primephonic (2021) and created Apple Music Classical (March 2023).]

The product design part of this project focuses on this part of the strategy — melding Spotify and IDAGIO into a new app, called Spotify Classical.

Goals

• Following the acquire-and-rebrand strategy, adapt IDAGIO to create a new Spotify app

• Keep/improve IDAGIO’s current search functionality on Spotify Classical

• Enhance features unavailable on Spotify — like Moods and live Events — for added value

• Add features — like podcasts — that Spotify had and was focusing on but that IDAGIO lacked, again to add value for subscribers

Constraints

Business — I had no access to Spotify’s stakeholders or business objectives, nor any budget. I had to make educated guesses about product design decisions based on Spotify’s past decisions and recent initiatives — for example, in 2020 Spotify had just started a big push into podcasts.

Technical — Similarly, with no access to Spotify’s engineering or developers, I had to reach out to software engineers I know, to get some technical advice on streaming issues like metadata, databases, and backend servers, all of which would drive design decisions.

Spotify’s classical music problem

Recapping research findings — it’s the metadata

Above is a visual example of Spotify’s classical music problem:

⚠️ Trying to browse hundreds of recordings of a popular classical piece (like one of Bach’s Brandenburg concertos) is a jumbled mess.

The problem — explored here in depth — comes down to this:

• 🎸 Popular music streaming services like Spotify and Apple Music use a simple artist-song-album metadata structure

• 🎻 Classical music, though, requires almost triple the metadata

• Because of how they handle metadata, popular services just aren’t designed to allow easy discovery and browsing of classical music

By spring 2020, the problem had not gone unnoticed. Two music streaming services dedicated specifically to classical music and its listeners — Primephonic in 2017, and IDAGIO in 2019 — launched new classical music streaming apps specifically to take advantage of the market gap presented by popular services like Spotify and Apple Music.

Key Research Findings

Before diving into any design solutions, I spent several months conducting research and analysis — including extensive interviews with classical listeners, customer journey mapping, persona creation, task analysis, and competitive audits — to understand and define:

• 🎻 classical listeners and their needs

• 😫 task flows and pain points

• 💻 technical challenges surrounding metadata

• 📈 business opportunities

Here’s what I found:

1. ❌ Spotify and other popular music streaming apps aren’t designed for classical music or its listeners; pain points center around browsing, discovery, and search

2. 🎶 The classical music market is small but fiercely loyal — it’s an edge case for music

3. 💰 Technical efforts to update Spotify’s metadata for classical would be cost-prohibitive

4. ✅ Specialized apps like IDAGIO have already solved the classical metadata problem

5. 📊 Business opportunities exist for popular streamers to better engage their classical audience and drive subscriptions

Research recommendation

⭐️ Based on these findings, the best solution that balanced listener needs, technical efforts, and business ROI was to:

• acquire, adapt, and re-brand an existing classical music streaming service, like IDAGIO to create a new app that Spotify could use to incentivize premium subscriptions

🚦 This is where the design phase of this Spotify Classical product design project began.

Analyzing flows, creating ideal journeys

Following the research that lead to the decision to adapt IDAGIO into a new Spotify app, I wanted to deeply understand IDAGIO:

• How listeners accomplished key tasks, and

• How that would translate to an ideal user journey for users of the new Spotify app, which was now called Spotify Classical.

Analyzing the steps involved in each task flow — search, discovery, browsing, comparing, creating and editing playlists — helped me create storyboards of an ideal listening experience.

The task flows and story boards would operate as a roadmap for the coming design phase.

Creating structure — melding the information architecture of two apps

Building on an ideal user journey and with task flows in hand — and with the idea of keeping the best parts of IDAGIO and Spotify — I began looking at the structure of each app, to find commonalities and overlap. From here I created a new information architecture for what would become Spotify Classical.

• Spotify didn’t have anything like IDAGIO’s “Moods” feature

• Nor did IDAGIO possess a dedicated section for podcasts

• So I eventually had to update my initial information architecture to reflect Spotify's ongoing podcast focus in 2020.

Adapting Navigation

How Spotify should Spotify Classical be?

In adapting IDAGIO to become a Spotify app one big question was: how much should it change (if at all)?

I knew from user research and testing that IDAGIO was not only beloved ❤️ by its listeners but also — being designed specifically for classical music — was easy to use. It was important to keep (and even improve) that usability.

However, since a key business goal was to drive more Spotify subscriptions, I assumed that the new app should still be familiar to Spotify users. Some compromise seemed necessary.

Navigation bars — melding different icons and terms

Spotify had a simpler navigation than IDAGIO — home, search and your library.

Aside from “Moods”, IDAGIO’s navigation had essentially the same navigation as Spotify but used different terms (discover for home, browse for search and collection instead of your library).

Quick user-testing nav with listeners

Keeping the icons that were the same in both apps — home and search — I decided to simplify “Your Library” to just “Library” and opted to use the heart from IDAGIO’s corresponding “Collection,” in lieu of Spotify’s weird 3-lines icon, as hearts being common UI shorthand for “favorite”. And what is a collection if not a library of favorites?

I ran some quick user-testing on Maze with a half-dozen classical listeners I had previously interviewed while conducting research.

Results — while far from definitive, were above 85% successful — gave me confidence that the design was on the right track.

…and then a quick pivot

Adding a new feature to increase user value

IDAGIO launched a new feature called Global Concert Hall during the same time I was ideating and wireframing Spotify Classical’s new navigation. This feature allowed users to virtually attend live concerts, and it was another innovative feature, like Moods, that Spotify didn’t have.

• ⚠️ Because the whole point of Spotify acquiring IDAGIO to create Spotify Classical was to give listeners a new reason to subscribe or upgrade, I decided to add this new feature to the design.

But adding it mid-process causes delays

The new feature forced me to backtrack and assess whether the Concerts, later Events, and features were worth including in this iteration. After a quick analysis of competitors, I decided it was a market differentiator worth having.

So, adapting and re-designing, I added Concerts to the new navbar, simplified the Moods moon icon, and re-tested with my classical listeners again to confirm this design would work.

It got a 95% success rate.

From navigation to wireframes

It wasn’t clear how similar to Spotify the adapted app should be

Because Spotify Classical would need to be designed to allow listeners to search, discover, browse and compare more than 3 times the amount of metadata as Spotify’s artist-song-album model, the interface would be correspondingly complex — as using IDAGIO showed — but the experience needed to be simple and easy.

Before going too far down any one design path — or just blindly copying IDAGIO — I sketched and then created simple, medium-resolution wireframes to test different approaches with some listeners.

More testing needed

The app needed to be both a classical music app that retained what current IDAGIO listeners loved about it, but also look and act like a Spotify app.

I created and user-tested some simple wireframes — one based on IDAGIO as it was and the other a version of Spotify — to help decide how best to proceed.

User testing points to an IDAGIO approach

✅ Testing wireframes with classical listeners whom I had previously interviewed confirmed the 5-icon navigation bar and new wording I had picked worked well.

🔥 In addition, users found the IDAGIO-based wireframes easier to use — especially regarding the Library page — than most Spotify-based designs. Listeners tended to overlook the tabs in the Spotify approach.

Re-branding helps transform IDAGIO into Spotify Classical

As it turned out, all it took to transform IDAGIO into a Spotify app were two simple changes . . . at least on a superficial level. But two key esthetic changes to the wireframes did give the new app a much greater feeling of being part of the Spotify family of apps:

• dark mode — changing the background from white to black

• typography — using Spotify’s font, Circular, and styles to create visual cohesion

Read more about Spotify Classical’s branding and the whole journey just to get to those seemingly obvious insights.

Designing for discovery, browsing, search, and comparison

With fundamentals in hand — a set of wireframes, a low-fidelity prototype, and a new style guide — I iterated on the early designs to create a series of mockups and, eventually, a high-fidelity prototype to test with listeners.

The process of “adapting” IDAGIO to Spotify Classical proved to be far more involved and took me far longer than I had ever imagined. All that metadata meant creating so many more ways to search-browse-compare, and so many more screens to make pixel-perfect.

It helped to focus the design on key areas of functionality:

• 🍎🍏 Comparing works

• 🔭 Browsing and discovery, and

• 🔍 Search

🍎🍏 Comparing works — the key functionality of Spotify Classical

• As a classical music streaming app, the most significant advantage IDAGIO had over Spotify was its ability to allow users to easily compare different recordings of the same work.

• Prototyping this functionality was crucial to the new app’s success, so I picked one of the most popular works by one of the most popular composers — Symphony No. 41 by Mozart — to show how listeners could browse through literally hundreds of recordings of this one work, filtering for popularity, year, conductor, or ensemble.

🔭 Browsing and Discovery

Another key goal of Spotify Classical was to improve browsing and discovery.

• Part of this was solved by stipulating that Spotify Classical would only feature classical works and podcasts — there would be no Lizzo songs popping up next Liszt sonatas while browsing for piano works.

🏠 Spotify Classical’s Home page — on IDAGIO called Discovery — would be the home of discovery providing listeners with:

• New featured albums

• Editors’ selections

• Curated Playlists

🔎 Searching for music 8 different ways

🔎 Because of its simple artist-song-album metadata, Spotify’s search really only requires a search bar for most popular music. For more classical’s more complicated metadata, more complex search was needed. Search on Spotify Classical — following IDAGIO — would allow users to easily search by a variety of metadata:

1. Composer

2. Ensembles

3. Conductor

4. Performer

5. Instrument

6. Genre

7. Period

8. and by the search bar

Creating more value for premium subscribers

A big part of the strategy inherent in Spotify Classical was to provide listeners with greater incentives to upgrade their Spotify subscriptions to the premium level, which would include all the Spotify apps*, including Spotify Classical.

* One of these apps, Spotify Stations, has since been discontinued.

With this business objective in mind, I sought to add value to Spotify Classical, primarily by keeping several IDAGIO innovations Spotify does not have — Events, Moods, and Stories — while adding a feature IDAGIO lacked, podcasts.

Each of these features presented interesting challenges, from user flow to accessibility to audience education, and are covered in separate UX case studies.

Results & Next Steps

🎉 Overall strategy validated by real events

The entire strategy I pursued in this exploratory project — for Spotify to acquire, adapt, and re-brand an existing classical service to improve its classical experience — seemed obvious if, maybe, a bit unrealistic back in August 2020.

But history has proved my analysis correct, at least, for another company that had the exact same classical problem as Spotify — a ton of classical music, and the wrong metadata framework. Apple Music first purchased Primephonic in 2021 and then re-launched it as Apple Music Classical in 2023. It was eerie to see it happen. It feels like a missed opportunity for Spotify.

🥳 Spotify Classical is a success…

I tested identical browsing and discovery tasks on both the Spotify Classical prototype and Spotify itself with a group of musicians and classical fans I first met during user research.

Results were positive:

• Task success rates for browsing and discovery were triple (92%) for the new app

• Satisfaction with Spotify Classical (85%) was more than double what it was with Spotify

• Listeners, especially serious musicians, loved it

… but 🤨 questions remain

A number of important usability and technical issues remained that I did not address in this project:

• How would listeners access their Spotify music from Spotify Classical?

• Could IDAGIO listeners still listen to their libraries?

Key Takeaways

Doing nothing can be the right answer sometimes…

If I had followed the numbers I found during the research I conducted then I would have ended up building nothing.

Which turned out to be, for Spotify, maybe the right thing to do. Nothing. Since 2020, Spotify has seemingly continued to ignore its classical listeners even while it has double-downed on its artist-song-album metadata format by focusing on podcasts and now audiobooks. The result is that it jumped ahead of Apple with a 24% surge in subscribers.

• So maybe “doing nothing,” is the best business decision sometimes

…but being a champion for your users is more important.

Apple Music’s decision to transform Primephonic into Apple Music Classical validated my decision to be a champion for classical listeners. I’m proud I took action to improve an experience even when the ROI said inaction would be better for business.

It turns out, according to Apple Music, that classical music listeners are much more than the “edge case” I thought:

According to Jonathan Gruber, Apple's research has found that far from being music snobs, classical fans actually listen to many more kinds of music than listeners to other music genres. "What we found," he says, "is that classical customers are not sitting in an elite corner somewhere. They're actually the biggest music fans there are. They're the ones who listen to the widest variety of genres, way above the average of your average listener of music."

Stakeholder/team input is key

If I’d had access to stakeholders — especially decision-makers, business strategists, and developers — I am certain this project would have proceeded very differently.

On the other hand, because I had no experts on my “UX team of one,” I was forced to be resourceful and try to find answers myself, collaborating with developer friends and business colleagues when they were able, which ended up teaching me a great deal.

I learned I wanted to be a product designer

Finally, this passion project taught me that I wanted to become a product designer. I was an art director studying UX design at the time, through the Interaction Design Foundation, and this project was my first real case study. I loved working on it, all of it— research, analysis, ideating, design, testing, all of it. I’m hoping to do more like it.

Toolstack

• Pens, markers, rulers, stencils, paper (sketching)

• Figma (design)

• Sketch (design)

• Maze (user-testing)

• Google Forms (surveys)

• Google Sheets (analysis)

• LucidChart (user research, analysis)

Other case studies from the Spotify Classical project:

🕶️ Spotify Classical: Accessibility

🎧 Spotify Classical: Podcasts

🎟️ Spotify Classical: Events

🖋️ Spotify Classical: UX Research

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