CASE STUDY: artist merch on spotify
Unlocking new revenue streams for artists
ROLE: SENIOR PRODUCT DESIGNER
The surge in music streaming has resulted in a decline in record sales, impacting artists' earnings. Unfortunately, the distribution of streaming revenue is fragmented, posing a challenge to significantly boost artist income. In 2020, we spun up a cross-functional working group with the goal of envisioning a future where Spotify creators could earn sustainable income from their art while creating a fresh revenue stream for Spotify.
We ran a series of sprints and research with a diverse set of stakeholders. From this, enhancing and amplifying artist merch to top fans emerged as the clear winning value proposition. This decision took into account app restrictions, tech limitations, other team priorities, and time constraints for achieving our goals. The choice of merch made sense as we owned the end-to-end experience, allowing us to feel out the worth of our monetization efforts quickly.
Despite already offering merch on Spotify, the process was convoluted through a third-party solution often overlooked by artist teams. Recognizing the need for improvement and enhancing the user experience, in 2021, we introduced a partnership with Shopify.
Now equipped with a refined value proposition and improved access to merch on the platform, our next step was surfacing the right merch in front of the right fans.
In this role I…
Acted as Design Lead for a product area of over 30 people, establishing the product opportunity for Fan Monetization on Spotify and identifying merch as the first avenue to get us there.
Worked as lead designer for our merch awareness strategy: ‘How might we surface the right offer to the right fan at the right time in the right way?’
Launched artist stores on Spotify. Examples: Olivia Rodrigo, Noah Kahan
Created the vision and foundation for our merch strategy that continues to evolve today.
Created prototypes and worked with insights to establish willingness- to- pay research.
Established a merch email strategy and designed a vision for omnichannel merch conversion.
