SecretSet Case Study

The SXSW Hackathon spans 24 hours of high-tech creativity as music, XR, and film hacker/creators use their programming knowledge to develop industry-changing prototypes and compete for cash prizes awarded by our panel of celebrity judges.¹

The hackathon was held on Mar 15 - 16, 2016 with teams competing for one of three places to win a total of $10,500.

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The focus of the hackathon had three catagories:

• Commerce: how is money getting to artists and rights-holders and can blockchain technology help?
• Creation: how can musicians use tech to create and perform music in new ways?
• Consumer: how can we improve the fan or listener experience?

To help push ideas further, SXSW had a group of artists and entrepreneurs-in-residence to help the teams. Those selected to help were: Alex Ebert of Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros, rapper Ryan Leslie, and Kiran Gandhi of Madame Gandhi and M.I.A.³

We decided to settle on creating a concept based on commerce. Our question became, How can artists connect with fans, customers, listeners and viewers in a mutually exclusive beneficial way?

Research

Looking through the lense of commerce we kept coming back to two main questions:

• Can artists make money outside of selling concert tickets, swag and albums?
• Would fans pay to experience everyday activities with music artists they love?

During our research I got the opportunity to briefly sit down with Alex Ebert of the band Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros to ask him a few questions. I was curious to know his opinion on what he thought super-fans wanted to experience. His thoughts involved listening parties, happy hours, jam sessions and even secret/private sets.

Artists need novel ways to reach out to their fans. Fans want more intimate experiences with artists. Can artists utilize this opportunity to create new ways to monetize? With this in mind we decided to explore the idea of small, impromptu shows with limited invites aka a secret set.

Business Canvas

Now that we had a problem, we needed to understand the business implications of our idea. We created a business canvas to help map our product’s value, customers, and finances. This exercise helped us understand how we could potentially monetize.

Journey Map

To understand our problem deeper we created a journey map which helped us visualize our customer journey.

In its most basic form, journey mapping starts by compiling a series of user actions into a timeline. Next, the timeline is fleshed out with user thoughts and emotions in order to create a narrative. This narrative is condensed and polished, ultimately leading to a visualization.⁴

Wireframe

Mobile: The Secret set mobile experience was focused on the fans perspective. It was important that we have a simple and clean flow that would get fans to what they want, their favorite music! No login needed, just punch in the code, if there was a price then the user would enter their payment information and be connected quickly to their content.

Web: The goal of the web experience was to create a way for music artists to manage and create their secret sets. At a high-level we focused our efforts on a total of 6 screens: Homepage, Login/Reset, Dashboard, Analytics, Set List, Set Detail.

Brand

Design

Simple and bold were the key tenets for our web and mobile experiences. From the striking purple to the simple logo that left users questioning ‘what is this?’ to ‘it does what?’. I wanted the focus to be less about the brand and more on the artist fan connection. To add to this connection I opt’d to have sentiment faces users could tap during the set they were watching. This allowed artists to get realtime feedback on whether fans were enjoying the set.