Top Ones
View your top artists on Spotify whenever you want.
Part 2 - About the Product
Product inspiration
Top Ones was partly inspired by Spotify Wrapped, Spotify’s signature year-in-review feature. Wrapped gets released near the end of the year (usually in early December). Instagram stories and shares ensue. Then, after a month or two, it’s gone from the app. When you think about what Wrapped is, the short-livedness makes sense. It’s of-the-moment. It summarizes what you did over time, but shows it to you at a specific point in time.
If I were a marketing person at Spotify, I wouldn’t want to change a thing. But as a designer, I want to make products valuable and interesting for users. And as a product manager, my job is, partly, to keep people using the app. So then, we need something that has the spirit of Wrapped but is “evergreen” (i.e. always available).
A missed opportunity for Spotify
Spotify is missing an opportunity by not having this. It would fit right into the app, as it is highly personalized to users and relevant to Spotify’s core product. It’s very shareable. And perhaps most importantly for a company that prioritizes user engagement, it’s the type of feature that someone might use repeatedly, and often.
Why doesn’t Spotify already do this? I can speculate (these aren’t mutually exclusive):
Theory 1: Retrieving data costs money. Retrieving lots of user data, like top artists, on a frequent basis can bring high costs in terms of engineering effort and infrastructure. Offering this in the app, and not just over API, would make it accessible to many more users, potentially increasing costs and risk. But Spotify is good at this! They've distilled two mediums and numerous genres into a single app. They could figure it out.
Theory 2: Protecting their moat. Companies like Spotify fiercely protect proprietary data and the competitive advantage, or "moat", that it provides. However, they already make this data available over their developer API. Therefore, I wouldn't expect them to be majorly concerned about this.
Theory 3: It might creep some people out. I suspect that most people would be creeped out by seeing firsthand what data tech companies collect on them. But when companies build products that give users more direct value from their data, everyone wins.
Theory 4: Recommendations are the secret sauce. What does Spotify do with all that customer data (besides advertising)? Recommendations. Specifically, curated music/podcasts based on your listening history and what they know about you. Raw user data is only so valuable, which is why Spotify freely gives some of it out over their Developer API. Therefore Spotify likely sees its recommendations as so core to its product that it wants to maximize how much users interact with that layer of the product and minimize users' ability to go around it. In other words, Spotify wants users to primarily discover content through Spotify's recommendations, not through the underlying data that feeds into it.
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Or, go back to Top Ones Part 1: Design Breakdown