Beats Music
A music service curated by people who believe music is powered by emotion and life, not algorithms. So we built the whole service with that in mind. It launched as the #1 music app and #5 overall iPhone app, and was so fresh and popular that Apple bought Beats shortly after launch. It is now Apple Music.
The promise of the app, “Music that’s always right for you” was key to its success. To deliver on this, Just for You – the app’s landing page – was completely built on recommendations. In order for this to work, we designed a playful onboarding experience to gather some initial information on the user’s taste.
The Sentence was unlike any other music recommendation tool out there. It your taste with a few inputs to create custom on-demand playlists that we perfect for the activity, mood and moment.
Many services consider actions like hate as off-brand, but for Beats Music we embraced it. When it comes to music, the genres or artists you hate are often more telling than the ones you like. Likes may follow a trend, but hating something can be very personal.
Artists had a platform to talk to fans and fans were given a way to discuss music with their peers, while algorithms matched people by their taste profiles. Making the work of building up a like-minded network much simpler so fans could focus on sharing the music they love.
I was part of the team at R/GA London that decided how the app should work, what language appeared across the service, and how Beats Music should express its values to the world.