Spotify Live Product Proposal—How could Live Audio look like on Spotify?

How Locker Room can fit into Spotify’s ecosystem

Edit: Coincidentally, two days after this article was published, Spotify launched Spotify Greenroom, which appears to align with the analysis and proposal outlined in this article!

In light of Spotify’s recent Locker Room acquisition, Spotify is gearing to tap into Live Audio, a space that blew up in early 2021 with Clubhouse’s meteoric rise. Given the relevance and buzz surrounding live audio, I put together a product proposal outlining the strategy, vision, and future direction of what “Spotify Live” can look like for everyone’s audio platform.

For context, I interned at Spotify as one of two Product Manager interns in the summer of 2020; I absolutely love podcasts, find live audio interesting, and thought this would be a fun project, so keep in mind that this is all from an outside-perspective.

Before diving in—just to clarify—Live Audio is different from radio in that radio is a one way conversation, hosts speaking to listeners while listeners most of the time listen passively; in contrast, Live Audio facilitates more of a live, engaging conversation, with listeners often having the chance to speak with the host and be an active part of the conversation.

Now that that’s out of the way, below is the product proposal (this medium article is based on a slide deck).

Context

The context for this proposal is straightforward — but there are a few important clarifications and assumptions outlined here so we’re all on the same page.

The assumptions outlined above concretely define parameters for the rest of the proposal.

Insights and Strategy

Objectives

First and foremost, Spotify’s primary goal of pursuing Live Audio, as detailed in the previous section, is to keep both Spotify listeners and creators engaged to increase consumption and retention on the platform. Spotify Live can do just that by providing creators with the ability to engage with their fans creatively and live.

In the long-run, though, Spotify should look to cater the Live Audio product to creators and specifically invest in creating new, alternative monetization avenues built on Live Audio. Offering an additional source of income via Live Audio will drive and sustain engagement from creators, and also folds nicely into Spotify’s current artist sustainability efforts that align perfectly with its mission statement—giving a million creative artists the opportunity to live off their art.

Problems and Opportunities

Taking into account CEO Daniel Ek’s specific remarks around adoption trends for creators, Spotify should focus on listeners’ / Spotify users’ experience to drive high adoption among listeners, as Creators will use Spotify Live if Spotify can guarantee a large listening base. As such, the following accordingly focuses on identifying user persona for listeners rather than creators.

Again, these personas are not MECE (mutually exclusive, collectively exhaustive), but identifies key user personas on Spotify who could adopt and use Live Audio.

Each cell in the matrix provides very high-level analysis, commentary, and “grade”; the user persona with the highest grade across all the categories will be the focus of Spotify Live. Of course, in an ideal world, we’d have concrete data points and insights to support the analyses, the grading also supplemented by user research and secondary research.

Reactionary content listeners grades fairly comparably to users with high affinity to creator(s). The key difference is that focusing on users with affinity to creators will likely provide more impact to Spotify’s overall business and engagement of creators due to monetization opportunities; as noted in the Objectives slide, the long-term goal of Spotify Live should be unlocking new monetization opportunities for creators. Users with the highest affinity to creators (i.e. super fans) are more likely to try and ultimately adopt Live Audio shows hosted by their favorite creators—and the higher the adoption on the listeners’ end, the better the experience and incentive for the creators to use Spotify Live. To top it off, these listeners are more likely to spend money on their favorite artists and podcast hosts.

Spotify Live 1.0, the first version/iteration of Live Audio on the Spotify platform, will be focused on users with high affinity to creators. Specific vision regarding this experience follows.

Hypothesis and Solution

Spotify Live could be a phased approach, with Spotify Live 1.0 focusing on the primary North Star objective outlined earlier—increasing engagement for both listeners and creators.

Assuming that we require validation and evidence before moving onto Spotify Live 2.0, the metrics outlined above will serve as guardrails and indicators to measure the success of Spotify Live 1.0.

If measures of success for Spotify Live 1.0 indicate a success, Spotify Live 2.0 efforts can be underway.

The proposal for Spotify Live 2.0 is intentionally left vague and open ended, as iterations upon learnings from 1.0 will drastically change our vision and provide new ideas.

Product and Experience

The user interface of Spotify Live’s experience seamlessly fits into the current design, look, and feel of Spotify. The experience for hosts will look different and may require offering on Spotify for Artists, but these considerations are touched upon later in the slides.

Live Audio can be surfaced to users on a shelf in a user’s homepage.

Other features, such as Marquee functionality, can be leveraged to surface and promote Live Audio appropriately to users.

These high-level items require further discourse with relevant stakeholders and depend largely on the timeline and other parameters leading up to the launch of Spotify Live 1.0. For example, the platform for creators and hosts of a Live Audio session require specific considerations due to technical limitations; more specifically, artists’ profiles on Spotify — managed on Spotify for Artists — are different from casual Spotify users’ accounts from a functionality standpoint (e.g. artist profile accounts cannot create playlists on Spotify), and therefore require technical investigation and validation to determine where Spotify Live’s experience will live in-app for the hosts (i.e. in Spotify app vs Spotify for Artists vs Anchor, etc)

Some high-level considerations, such as privacy/compliance and hate speech/abuse prevention, will need to be ironed out for Spotify Live 1.0.

Go-Forward Strategy

The rough roadmap starts with Milestone 1, which focuses on alignment of teams and stakeholders to build a Minimum Viable Experiment or Minimum Viable Product. Learnings and results from Milestone 1 will shape Milestone 2 and Milestone 3.

MVE depends on the buy-in from the executive leadership team; if Spotify deems that more evidence and indicators are necessary before investing significant resources to fully launch Spotify Live 1.0 (which is the most likely case), MVE will enable Spotify to validate some assumptions and provide data points to give more confidence before going all in.

To iterate, a fake door test is a cheap, fast way to quickly iterate and get learnings; that being said, given Locker Room is available, launching a redesigned Locker Room may be a quick way to get an MVP out.

Re-skinning Locker Room with new UI that fits into Spotify’s color scheme, as well as introducing new features within the revamped app, could facilitate expedite the speed with which we introduce new experimentative features without cannibalizing any features on the core Spotify app.

And that’s a wrap for this outside-in product proposal! Long story short, Spotify can leverage its unique position to further engage creators and listeners in the short-run, while in the long-run enabling creators to have new source of income.

As a reminder, I currently do not work at Spotify, so this is from an outside perspective. If you have any questions about this product proposal, you can reach out to me at bari.eom[at]gmail.com, or find me on LinkedIn.