LabelRadar is a web platform streamlines the demo submission process across the music industry, helping artists get heard while also allowing labels and promoters to review new submissions in an efficient and addictive way.
For added context, the process of submitting tracks to labels can be very discouraging for artists of all ages. There’s so much a label manager and their A&Rs (‘artists & repertoire’ employees) can listen to in a day and their backlogs can be huge so it’s common for tracks to go unnoticed for long periods of time, leaving artists waiting for weeks to potentially get a negative response about their track.
On top of that radio silence, the platform didn’t allow for users to connect with each other either to collaborate or just to support each other in their artistic journey. This isolation made users think about the platform as a scam and they started sharing their frustrations on platforms such as reddit.
We started discovery and after some competitive research and surveys we gather some data that would help us understand the problem deeper and come up with the best solution:
- Of the 31,660 artists who submitted tracks to LabelRadar in 2022, 60.2% received only rejection notifications or ‘skips’ as outcomes
- Artists are not able to see other artists having success on the platform, which also can lead to skepticism about the platform’s overall value proposition
- The lack of Artist-to-Artist visibility and engagement means that there is no on-platform community developing on the artist side, which could otherwise provide support, inspiration and networking opportunities for artists.
With this information in mind we decided to design two different initiatives that complemented each other. The first one being a new home page for artists called ‘Artist Activity’ that would display latest stats and tracks that had been signed recently as well as popular artists. Artists would land here instead of landing on the billing page which, for free users, was a suboptimal user experience. The information presented on this page is meant to show, transparently, what’s going on on the platform so users get visibility on other users’ experiences.
The product requirements only contemplated a news feed but I wanted to make sure we were adding as much value to the user as possible and make this page a jumping off point to other corners of the platform.
.png)
Artist Activity page (LabelRadar)
After some consideration, relatively around feasibility and budget, we launched an MVP that allowed users to:
- Listen to tracks that had been signed recently (to get inspired by and learn what’s hot for labels);
- Get to know users that are trending (to encourage connection requests);
- See a feed of activity happening in real life, and a filtered tab that shows artists ‘Similar to me’ (also to encourage them to connect);
- Learn more about PRO (by having an upsell component on the right side that displays some of its benefits).
To further encourage connection requests we also implemented the ‘Artist Network’ page, which allows users to discover artists, browse and filter, and send connection requests to other artists (5 free connection requests for free users, unlimited for PRO users). But we wanted to make it as intentional as possible. So after some consideration and discussions between product, engineers and business, we decided to add a new ‘Open to collaboration’ tag to profiles, that users could configure within their settings, as to signpost what their intentions are when connecting with other users. They would be able to select if they wanted to collaborate at all and if so, in which environment they would prefer to do so (in person, remotely or both).
.png)
Artist Network page (LabelRadar)
%20%E2%80%94%20Collaboration%20signposting..png)
Artist Profile (LabelRadar) — Collaboration signposting.
Allowing users not only to connect but to also flag themselves as open to collaborate was crucial to enhance their experience. We hoped it would make the experience more transparent and our users feel less siloed.
A month after launching both initiatives, as the engineering team tracked some of the main flows and interactions, we were able to gather the following results:
- Just under 2k connection requests sent.
- A little over 1k artists marked their profiles as open to collaborate.
- 34.3% connection request accepted rate / 2.7% decline / 63% pending.
- Average response time on a connection request is 2 days.
- 173 conversations started between artists.
- PRO users on average have sent 7 connection requests.
- 64% of connection requests have been sent by PRO users.
Our efforts to improve the artist experience go beyond this project but it seems like a good start. Now artist are aware of their peers, can check on each other’s profiles, send connection requests and collaborate outside the platform on producing the music they want to submit.
Go back to projects
