UX analysis: Apple Music vs. Spotify’s artist page
I love music.
From Wolf Alice, Lorne Balfe and Kendrick Lamar to Bring Me the Horizon, Enter Shikari and Harry Styles, if it’s got a good beat, I can dig it (sorry country music, we have to agree to disagree). For me, music and the means through which I’m able to enjoy it are literally priceless.
Some time ago, I chose Apple Music as my team in the music streaming wars. Being the Apple fanboy that I am, when Apple Music introduced streaming at $10 per month, I signed up and never looked back. I was one of those users in the Apple ecosystem that Apple was easily able to onboard onto Apple Music since they already owned the rest of my digital life, easily stealing me away from the likes of Spotify and Google Play. For the past several years, I’ve loved the experience.
That is, until I discovered Apple Music had been missing something big this whole time.
Like me, my wife loves music. We have a few bands we both absolutely adore. One afternoon a few weeks ago, we had a conversation that went like this:
Her: “Oh hey, Wolf Alice and Gang of Youths are going on tour soon. They’ll both be in Dallas next year.”
Me: “Fantastic. We need to plan out our upcoming concerts soon.”
Her: “Yep. Oh wow, look who else is coming to town…”
Me: “How are you seeing all of these? Did Ticketmaster send you a list of upcoming concerts or something?”
Her: “Nope. Spotify shows me upcoming shows for the artists I listen to.”
Me: “…”
What was an innocent conversation planted a seed in my head that grew into an annoying, thorny plant that snaked its way around my brain over the next few weeks.
From the music lover in me, I was annoyed that my music streaming service wasn’t displaying upcoming shows for me to easily find. Instead, I had to manually look up my favorite artists’ tours on Google and track them myself or hope that I’m following all my artists’ social media accounts (I’m not).
For the product manager in me, I started to sense bigger problems for Apple’s Music app in three main areas:
- The Apple Music user’s experience
- Apple Music’s features losing to Spotify (its biggest competitor)
- My favorite artists not being supported well by my music streaming service
Metrics to Know:
To add some context to these two behemoths and their stakeholders, let’s look at a few key metrics for 2020:
- Apple Music annual revenue: $4.1 billion
- Apple Music paid user count: 112 million*
- Spotify annual revenue: $9.5 billion
- Spotify paid user count: 155 million
Artists’ Current Streaming Rates
- Apple Music: $0.01 per stream (avg)
- Spotify: $0.004 per stream (avg)
Super important: artists’ main source of revenue does NOT come from streams on services like Spotify and Apple Music. Artists used to go on tour to promote album sales as their chief source of income. This has switched thanks to music streaming. Artists now have to rely on concerts and tours as their chief income generator.
Knowing this, if you want to financially support the artists whose music is the soundtrack to your very life, a fantastic way of doing that is showing up to their shows or buying their merchandise. Additionally, artists need other ways to support themselves beyond music streams.
* = Apple has not publicly updated user data since Jan 2019, so we are relying on estimations from industry experts
In-App Artist Pages
Apple Music
Since we’ve covered that Apple Music doesn’t show an artists’ upcoming concerts, let’s quickly dive into what the service does offer.
As seen in the screenshots, Apple Music provides a basic view of the selected artist. You can browse their full catalogue of songs, albums, singles and EPs. You can also see a limited selection of music videos from the artist, Apple Music playlists the artist is featured on as well as any video interviews Apple Music has sponsored with the artist. Most artists also have a bio section that is referred to as the “About” section, including origin, genre, and the date the artist started making music. Lastly, you are treated to a “Similar Artists” section that Apple Music curates, showing you other acts that you may like based on the artist in question.
All in all, this may be a basic view of your artists but it is very easy to find what you’re looking for and get to jamming. That’s probably the best thing I personally like about Apple Music’s artist page: it’s very easy to get in, find what you’re looking for, and press play.
Spotify
Spotify does essentially everything that I mentioned above in the Apple Music section, plus more.
As seen in the screenshots, Spotify allows the user to view:
- upcoming live shows from the artist
- merchandise the artist is currently selling
Not only can I view these things, but I can also click-through to directly make purchases without having to manually leave Spotify — I can simply click through to buy tickets or that hot new band t-shirt I can’t live without.
Spotify’s support site shows exactly how an artist/label can do this (spoiler alert: it’s really easy):
“To promote your concerts on Spotify, you need to have them listed on one of Spotify’s ticketing partner sites: Ticketmaster, Songkick, Eventbrite, AXS, or eplus (Japan only). The concerts will then automatically display on Spotify, in the Concerts section of Browse and on Artist Profiles, under popular tracks.”
Likewise, for merchandise the support site says:
“Artists on Spotify can now sell merch to fans via the platform. This can be a limited edition vinyl, a classic band t-shirt or a patch to put on your jacket — more or less whatever you want related to your artist or band.
All merchandise on Spotify is managed by a third party provider called Merchbar. Signing up with Merchbar is free and as soon as you have your products available on Merchbar they will also be listed on Spotify.”
I assume Spotify is leveraging APIs from the select list of ticketing and merch services so that they don’t bottleneck or have to manage what shows /merch are displayed for each artist. It’s a really easy way for artists and labels to plug and play, knowing their shows and merch will be available to their listeners on Spotify without much extra work.
I can’t help but wonder if Spotify has turned this into a revenue stream of some sort, where any shows booked through the links in the app are tagged with revenue share for Spotify. I couldn’t find any public information on the subject, but I could see a case being made by Spotify to artists/labels that the value in allowing shows and merchandise to appear in-app would require a percentage on sales through those means.
Make Apple Music Better:
There are several reasons why Apple would be incentivized to add the concert ticket and merchandise features into their app.
Business Case:
Several cases could be made for Apple to want to incorporate these features. We’ll break it down into 3 different realms:
- Better support for the artists and record labels who fill the Apple Music catalogue
- More feature overlap with their competition
- And, of course, new revenue streams
First, the artist and record label side. By allowing users to make purchases that completely dwarf the revenue artists and record labels receive when compared to streaming rates, Apple would find themselves building a better brand among their music providers which can lead to more exclusive deals and more publicity from the artists they host.
Taking this a step further, there’s the new revenue stream angle. Apple could charge X% of all purchases made through the Apple Music app to the ticket sales and merchandising services that host their goods in-app. This would follow the same model Apple already employs in their App Store. Apple would sell this to their ticketing and merchandising partners due to Apple directly exposing their vast user base of millions to concerts and other goods that the users would otherwise not have seen.
And of course, it’s one less feature separating Apple Music from Spotify, making the list of reasons for Apple users to choose the outside streaming service even smaller. Since Apple Music and Spotify have almost identical pricing for the consumers, feature gaps can really make a difference for the music-lovers out there who want a one-stop-shop for all their music needs.
Future thinking: Apple could also streamline this revenue model further by crafting a new in-app view where users can see recommended concerts in their area (based upon the data Apple has on the user’s musical preferences), hot/new merchandise from their favorite artists, and upcoming concerts that their followers are attending. This would be a completely new part of the Apple Music experience, so maybe not a phase 1 objective, but something to consider for down the road feature enhancements.
Level of Effort:
Assuming we did our stakeholder research and all signs pointed to this being a worthwhile endeavor, we may want to start with an MVP.
A simple, limited MVP would employ in-app buttons on the Artist’s page. One button could say “View Upcoming Shows’’ and the other “View Merchandise” and would be viewable to select users in the ecosystem. From there, by leveraging the public APIs documented above, Apple allows users to view the purchasable items while tracking user metrics surrounding these buttons. These metrics would include which users click on the new buttons, how many convert to actual purchases, themes across which artists/genres get the most click (do only certain kinds of listeners use this feature?) not to mention qualitative feedback in the form of user and vendor surveys to learn how the experience is going.
If the MVP did prove to be valuable, fully fleshing this feature out past the MVP stage wouldn’t be too challenging. First, we’d of course conduct more user research to learn what they liked and didn’t like about the feature. Assuming we concluded users want an experience similar to Spotify’s, we’d continue using the APIs to support a front end which allows users to view previews of upcoming shows and merch on the artist page.
As we can see, the level of effort does not need to be very large, but the potential user experience boost such features like these could bring are potentially immense (user engagement would easily prove/disprove this theory early on).
What better way to get users more excited about their music and, by association Apple Music as their streaming service, than to meet the user at the exact perfect time they would be most willing to want to financially support their artist?
Devil’s Advocate Time:
There could be a few reasons Apple has chosen not to allow for this functionality. You don’t become Apple by being lazy or non-intentional.
I could foresee them not implementing this functionality if Spotify has some sort of exclusivity with the ticketing and merch platforms they support in-app that bar Apple from being able to do the same. If that were the case, Apple is simply out of luck. According to the Ticketmaster dev site, however, it does look like their APIs are open to use by the public specifically for event discovery, so perhaps there is no agreement between them and Spotfiy, as an example.
A potentially more likely reason perhaps may be surmised by taking into account Apple’s company history and culture. Apple builds closed systems. They deliberately design and maintain the user’s every step of the user’s journey, where they are in complete control of what happens where and when in its ecosystem. For this reason, I could see Apple having decided they don’t want 3rd parties showing up and changing the carefully designed user experience at will in one of their most popular apps.
And of course, I have to assume that I could be wrong. Perhaps the data shows that the concerts and merch features on the artist pages in Spotify simply aren’t leveraged by a sizable percentage of music listeners. As I learned in my UX classes, I am not my user. But if I were at Apple, you can guarantee we’d be reaching out to the record labels, users, and music vendor services to find out just how much value we’re currently missing out on.
Summary:
By adding upcoming concert information and artist merchandise purchasing options to Apple Music, a clear win-win-win is made for all parties involved:
- Apple Music users: Users would easily be able to view/purchase tickets and merchandise for their favorite artists right when such buying decisions would be completely top-of-mind.
- The Artist / Record Label: The artist/label is able to remove barriers from being financially supported by their fans in the two biggest ways they make money current day: ticket and merchandise sales
- Apple Music: Apple Music would be creating a potential new revenue stream on its most popular app and increase stakeholder satisfaction all while also getting them closer to feature parity with their biggest competitor, Spotify.
By not having the ability to view upcoming shows and purchase artist merchandise in the Apple Music app, it makes me, the music lover, feel another step removed from my artist. As of right now, the Apple Music experience is purely a one-way digital connection whereas Spotify helps the user connect to the artist on a 2-way level and puts the user in a position to better connect with their favorite artists at a moment in their user journey when it makes sense for the user — when they’re jamming out to music!
By adding these features, Apple Music makes a more satisfying, valuable experience for all its stakeholders. Win-win-win.
Bonus:
Spotify loves sharing data with its users. For instance, Spotify incorporates fun metrics on the artist’s page such as how many times a specific song has been played by Spotify users and how many Spotify users have listened to the artist in the present month (data nerds like me love this).
I get sad every New Year’s when all my Spotify-user friends get amazing analytical reports from Spotify showing their year in review, from the artist they listened to most that year to Missed Hits (songs that match what I like but haven’t heard yet) and even sharing these stats via social media — I’m here ready to engage more with Apple Music and share you with my friends, but are you ready for me?
Post-Publication Update:
The day after I published this article on Medium, my wife’s Spotify app showed her the following pop-up — looks like Spotify isn’t forgetting about this competitive advantage they offer any time soon:
Sources:
- https://www.billboard.com/articles/business/9520384/spotify-2020-earnings-revenue-losses-subscribers/
- https://www.businessofapps.com/data/apple-music-statistics/
- https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2021/04/29/apple-music-paying-subscribers/
- https://www.republicworld.com/technology-news/apps/how-much-does-apple-music-pay-per-stream-apples-open-letter-reveals-how-artists-get-paid.html#:~:text=According%20to%20Wall%20Street%20Journal,that%20they%20are%20artist%2Dfriendly.
- https://www.businessinsider.com/how-much-does-spotify-pay-per-stream
- https://intercom.help/record-union/en/articles/3560664-how-do-i-list-concerts-on-spotify
