Spotify: Live Playlists

This is a case study presenting a concept that I developed for the music streaming service, Spotify. The concept was a result of a personal problem that I was experiencing. I allotted myself a total of 5 hours to complete this concept.

The Problem

To provide some context, I stream a variety of games on Twitch. One of the ways I try to make my content more enjoyable for my audience is by playing music in the background while I stream. My go-to app for this is usually Spotify. Occasionally, I have viewers who have song requests. I personally don't mind these requests and like taking song recommendations from viewers, however:

• Depending on the game I'm playing at a given time, it may not be convenient for me to switch over to Spotify to manually queue a requested song.
• When there are a lot of messages in my live chat, I might miss the request and the viewer has to repeat themselves.
• Sometimes there are multiple requests at once and it becomes difficult to keep track of every requested song.

That leads us to the main question: How can I allow my community to submit song requests without me needing to manually add those songs in the Spotify queue while I'm in the middle of a game?

My Solution

Spotify already has a feature called collaborative playlists, but that's not what I'm exactly looking for.

• Songs are saved into the playlist as opposed to being added into a queue.
• In addition, anyone with access can remove/reorder songs.
• People may not be comfortable with the idea of having a "shared" playlist with viewers who they are unfamiliar with.

Instead, I came up with the idea of Live Playlists:

• Instead of adding songs to a playlist, users are queuing up songs.
• Once a song is played, it will not longer be in the queue.
• If there is no song in queue, Spotify will pull songs from the owner's playlist of choice.
• The playlist will have an offline and online mode. When offline, the queue will be cleared and songs cannot be added.

Wireframes

I took a few screenshots of the Spotify desktop app as references and then created my wireframes for the Live Playlists.

High-Fidelity Mockups

The screens below display the flow of how a user (non-owner of playlist) would search and add a song to the playlist queue.

The next set of mockups below show the differences between the owner view and public view of the playlist. I also included how the playlists look in online and offline mode. The key features that owners have access to are:

• Playlist owners have the option to toggle the status between online and offline.
• Only playlist owners can play or pause songs.
• When viewing more options, playlist owners have access to additional settings, such as deleting the playlist.

Conclusion

Overall, this was a fun concept to brainstorm and create mockups for. Due to time constraints, I didn't replicate the sidebars and music player at the bottom of the screen. If I had more time, I would replicate these to help the design look more complete. I would also create additional screens that show more of the additional actions that playlist owners can take.