By 2019, Spotify for Artists had become the music industry's essential analytics tool — used by everyone from emerging artists to Beyoncé. But its home experience was a glorified spreadsheet. My job was to make it feel alive.
Spotify for Artists had become indispensable from a data perspective, but the interface was mostly just numbers. Artists would open the app and see a wall of data with no context, no personality, and no sense of what to pay attention to.
It needed a home experience that would ground users and help them navigate to what actually mattered.
The old home experience — numbers without context, personality, or hierarchy
As the Content Design lead I owned all the hierarchy. I built the UX logic for the redesign — including the hardest decision: what to show when the hero metric is zero. I collaborated with my product design partner and held final say on how content was displayed alongside the design director.
During research, we heard from artists that their favorite part of Spotify for Artists was the "listening now" stat — it made the coldness of the data feel alive. A real person is listening to your music right now. That's powerful.
The solution seemed simple: put that number front and center.
The "listening now" stat on desktop — the one feature that kept artists coming back, but wasn't in the mobile app
But when we looked more closely, we realized most artists who use Spotify don't have people listening all the time. Many would open the app and see a giant zero greeting them. The stat we wanted to celebrate would end up demoralizing the majority of our users.
Rather than hiding reality, we created a threshold system. Larger artists saw the real-time "listening now" stat front and center. Smaller artists saw their last-7-days data — a stat almost every artist has something for — styled with the same prominence and personality.
Two different hero designs, triggered by the size of an artist's fanbase. Same experience, same energy, different data.
We wanted the home to feel personal, not just personalized. Using Spotify's color-picking technology, we tailored each hero experience by pulling colors from the artist's profile image or latest release cover art.
Every artist who opens the app sees something that looks like their app — not Spotify's brand palette imposed on their identity. No two app experiences are alike.
The real design win wasn't making things pretty — it was building a system that's truthful and motivating at the same time, regardless of where an artist is in their career.
When artists started screenshotting the home screen to share with their fans — highlighting when people were listening, using the hero stat to thank their audience — that was the proof it landed.
Seeing our redesign used by artists for their own outreach validated our hypothesis: creating a unique home experience would bring a personal touch to the data and make artists feel like the experience was designed for them.