It’s now been nearly one year I’ve discovered that my family back home had a Spotify Family plan with an empty slot and jumped on it!

I’ve been a heavy Soundcloud and Mixcloud user for 10 years and mainly use them at home while listening to DJ mixes.

Spotify just replaced my usage on mobile, thanks to their huge catalogue and recommendation system which helps a lot finding new gems 🔥 while commuting in public transport.

But I still have a little frustration I’d like to talk about….

The problem

Being an electronic music promoter I have many DJ friends and we keep sending tracks to each other…but it’s not always a good time to listen to them.
Whether it’s at work, during diner, or while driving we can’t just stop what we’re doing at that time.

And guess what? I end up never listening to most of them.

Why? Well because in today's world we are over solicited and I just forget to listen to them. Those links get lost in conversations over Whatsapp, Messenger, or Text forever.

And that’s my second point. Even if you remember that somebody sent you a track to listen, you have to look into each messaging app you’re using to find that track.

So what can we do about that?

Well, I have a very well thought solution to that problem that would both benefit the users and Spotify.

Imagine if you could share songs directly to your friends using Spotify.

And those songs would end up in a special playlist that would act just like waiting-to-be-listened-to queue. And from there you’d be able to decide if you want to like it, add it to a playlist, or ditch it because you simply don’t like it.

So when you remember that your friend X sent you a song recently or you just open Spotify randomly to put some music on, you’ll find all the songs that have been shared with you since the last time you came on.

The tricky part

Searching for Spotify users to share a song to is dead easy.
But how do you control who can send songs to who?

I personally don’t want to receive songs from people I don’t know!

Spotify already lets users connect using their Facebook account and displays their friend's activity.

In order to test the idea without doing extra work, I would roll out the feature only to users who connect through Facebook.

Now, how would I integrate that feature into the current Spotify experience?

Still with that logic of generating less work as possible to test the idea I wanted to reuse as many screens as possible.

First things first, the share flow!

First I updated the sharing screen with a new sharing option “Friend on Spotify”

Then I created a new screen that would let the user pick one of his friends. For this, I got inspired by the Messenger sharing screen which I think is very well designed.

Second, the interesting part, that new playlist of gems your friends have sent you.

There are only a few screens that can display a list of songs in Spotify :
- The “Liked Songs” playlist
- Other playlists created by Spotify (Radios), another user or you
- Personalized playlists created by Spotify
- The album screen
- The artist screen

I went for the personalized playlist screen as other playlists are created by a user or Spotify and accessible by anyone as long as it is public. I thought the personalized one made more sense as it is curated for someone in particular.

The next question was to decide where to showcase those playlists made by your friends.

Since they don’t yet belong to your library when they are created, I decided these playlists had to be showcased on the home screen.

In order to differentiate from other types of playlists and to be able to display a badge for unseen added songs, I decided to make the playlists covers circle.

You can check the full prototype on Figma :

Why I believe it would be worth building

Being a product manager, I can tell you ideas are only a small part of the job.
There’s a lot of factors that come into play while deciding to build something or not.

Here are the questions I usually ask myself and what’s my point of view concerning that feature taking into account I don’t work at Spotify and therefore don’t have all the knowledge and data I would need.

Where does the need/idea come from? A user request? How many have asked for it?
The idea comes from me, I heavy daily user of Spotify and I have no idea if that request has been expressed or explored already.

What problem does it solve?
Users forget about songs that have been shared with them on messaging platforms.

How many users is it going to impact?
This feature will impact all of the users who use the sharing feature of Spotify which I believe concerns the majority of the user base.

How costly is it to build?
It’s hard to estimate without knowing anything about Spotify’s team velocity and how things are built behind the scenes but there are only 3 screens to update. That point would need to bring engineers and designers into a meeting to estimate precisely the work to do.

What metrics it might impact?
I’ve never worked at Spotify but my guess is that their north star metric is the number of tracks played.

If my assumptions are correct I believe this feature will increase it.

Once you open Spotify and found out friends have sent you songs you didn’t listen to yet, the chances are you are going to listen to most of them and will listen to songs that have been shared with you but you forgot about them.

On the contrary, without that feature, if you find a link in one of your conversations you will end up listening to this song only.

On the downside, receiving a link to Spotify content on a messaging platform would trigger you to open the app which won’t happen anymore.
To overcome this downside I would send a Spotify notification to the target user.

Is it aligned with the company mission and long term vision?
Since I don’t work at Spotify I can’t answer this question. But as they have a feature that lets you see what your friends are listening to and a feature that lets you collaborate on a playlist, I believe social features are pretty well welcomed.

Thank you for reading!

This was my first post ever on Medium, hope you enjoyed it!

If you are a Spotify user I’d be happy to have your feedback in the comments and don’t hesitate to give me some claps! 👏

You can also reach me on Linkedin if you want to have about it 💬