S02E07 — JUL2020

Spotify Tabs?

Hello world and welcome to the nineteenth edition of this rather buoyant newsletter. The feedback on “Baby Alienation” was unexpectedly massive. 

I wasn’t sure if the piece would be received as a sob story, a finger-pointing critique, or a frustration vent. Thankfully, I got some very well structured thoughts, confessions, and opposite angles. I’d like to thank everyone who took the time to message me. You rock!

Ok, let’s do this.

✦

Let me just put out a couple of points before we dig in because I don’t know where this piece could end up:

• I’m by no means related to Spotify, besides being a customer
• Knowing their top-notch talent, I’m pretty sure Spotify folks already explored this and many other similar concepts
• This shouldn’t be considered for one of those clout-leeching redesigns type of things. It’s just a weird idea made in a vacuum
• Due to my history of putting stupid ideas out there, I’m more curious to see how future-proof or not this one is going to be

Before The Internet Era 
When I was around 13, music digging consisted of a lot of running around with my main and only 40GB hard drive, hooking it up to friends and friends of friends (sometimes even total randos) PCs, and copying hundreds of MP3s. Often unnamed, almost always untagged, lo-fi quality techno, electro, acid, and '80s. Some goa trance here and there to spice things up.

I would enjoy listening to some amazing music without knowing what I'm actually listening to. This and having a very limited pool of music “dealers” was very frustrating for a nerdy kid like me, but I accepted the reality eventually.

Before the Spotify Era
As I moved to the city and got a broadband Internet connection, I started my new chapter of music digging. With early Last.fm recommendation mechanism and Russian torrent trackers — the world was mine.

The flow consisted of a lot of dedication and work in three separate streams:

1. Research and plotting 
   Last.fm/Discogs/Myspace/Google/Hype Machine/blogs/forums/Wikipedia etc. Making a map of relevant musicians, music genres, and producers in my head. Opening “similar artist” after “similar artist” pages and then reading through their discographies. Lots of tabs. This was an early age of social media so it was harder to stock. Also, most artists weren’t online anyway.
2. Finding and downloading
   Browsing numerous public and private trackers in order to find quality goods. Since downloading took lots of time and there were many, many fakes, I wanted to make sure that I was about to download the right stuff a priori.
3. Listening
   Just because I’d be downloading a bunch of music it didn’t mean that I’d actually want to listen to all of it. Because, still, I didn’t know what I was downloading. It’s weird, but I’d just keep skip-skip-skip-skip-skipping until I found what I liked. Delete what I didn’t.

* Fourth stream would be “Library Work” — the art of managing downloaded files. Though a specific beast, I don’t find it relevant to this story.

Activity Streams in The Pre-Spotify Era ↗

I liked researching, hated downloading, and depending on the moment either hated or totally loved the music that I just got.

This was the time of MySpace and the boom of bedroom production. SoundCloud launched around that time as well. New music was popping up on every corner. Things now got exponentially faster than in the “Before The Internet Era”, so enjoying the music was never an option. The more music I had access to, the less time I decided to listen to it attentively. 

Enjoying was already gone by now and my full focus was on keeping up with the latest coolness.

Besides connecting the dots in my own micro-musicverse, I got the taste of the "metadata" layer of data for the first time. This was the exciting time where I actually rediscovered lots of artists I already liked.

The Spotify Era
Spotify changed the way we listen to music. With Internet connection and an account, most of the world’s music is at your fingertips.

Spotify Desktop App ↗

This is the screenshot of the whole application, a very simple utilitarian-looking music player. Find what you want, click play and that’s it. Easy.

It made the paradigm of content downloading disappear. Listening became a commodity. Finding new content became time-cheap. And like many consumer streaming companies, Spotify’s goal is to keep you entertained so you listen for longer.

Activity Streams in The Spotify Era ↗

Now my time dispersion over activity streams looks like this. More time spent listening, less time researching. Even more so, research feels more like browsing. It is frictionless, but it does come with some caveats though.

If we zoom in, we’ll see it’s not just that the time spent on browsing shrunk, it also became somehow one-dimensional.

Research in The Spotify Era ↗

Early on, Spotify figured that people are lazy so they heavily invested in 1/ content surfacing algorithms and 2/ seamless streaming experience.

This is the origin of linear spatial movement design. Everything is a single playlist, made out of endless playlists. No need to go anywhere, no need to think too much, thus the notion of moving through these playlists feels so subtle.

But here’s a catch. With older music players where there was a single space — your computer, it made perfect sense to have single-playlist navigation. There were no surprises as you knew what you put in. With Spotify, where there are endless spaces — most of them not even yours and unexplored, and you never know what amazingness you could stumble upon. So it’s easy to get lost. Getting home is not an issue, but staying there for long enough is. 

It’s like going to a party when you are a teenager. It’s not even that, it’s like going to three parties in a single night, but in order to get to the next one, you need to get home first, somehow get total amnesia and go to the next party without remembering what happened a couple of hours before.

Each new playlist is going to be your first one. And unless you somehow bookmark the playlist, your space position will be lost. It’s akin to early Super Mario: whenever you bump into one of the enemies, you start the whole level all over. Except, here you are not avoiding enemies; you are avoiding algorithms. And this is the game you can’t win, so it feels like you are in a continuous loop.

The Loop ↗

To put it in a use case: 

• you stumble upon an interesting playlist,
• you start listening to it, 
• you like a specific song, 
• you want to check out the artist, 
• you go to the artist’s page, 
• you want to listen to some earlier work,
• the moment you click play here, 
• you start over. 

The previous playlist is gone. You can go back of course, but you can’t have it open for later unless you bookmarked it. The song you were listening to here is “restarted”.

The whole experience feels like web browsing without tabs. You can view a single web page at a time. Move back and forth. 

Back to Spotify. What if I don’t want to save a playlist? What if I want to listen to it but also check out a couple of artists from that list, too? What if, for some strange reason, in the middle of it I want to listen to Africa by Toto?

Or check this out, with the introduction of podcasts, the whole thing got to the next level. Podcasts could last for hours and I don’t usually finish them up in a single listening. This means that I start listening to it, pause, go listen to some music, get back after who-knows-how-long, a couple of days even, and continue where I left off. This is complicated.

And it is complicated because we got used to non-linear spatial orientation. For example, this is why visual inspiration tools such as Pinterest are popular. They work on a similar principle — you make collections, but you can visually arrange the position of those and you are also allowed to roam around. There are ephemeral parts, but there are solid-state parts.

In the context of desktop music player vs Spotify, Spotify feels more like a terminal than Pinterest. It feels ephemeral.

Besides orientation and navigation, the other pet peeve I see is the player. The player is linear, it allows listening to a single song at the time.

Introducing Tabs
Spotify is not just a player. It is a player and browser as well. I’d even argue, it’s a browser first.

Player + Browser ↗

In order to follow this analogy of Player + Browser, let’s take a look where the inspiration for this came from.

• Excel introduced multiple sheets in 1993
• Web browsers have tabs since early 2000
• MacOS introduced Spaces (multiple desktops) in 2009
• Pinterest and Twitter in their current mobile apps are enforcing “lists” and “interests” respectfully as the primary way of navigation

It’s the opposite of what Spotify is right now. It’s a multiplayer game with the ability to save your position whenever you want to.

For simple software, such as Spotify desktop app, introducing something like multiple spaces or tabs would probably bring chaos, but let’s take a look into what this might look like and the joy it could bring with it.

Spotify With Tabs ↗

Without touching anything else on the existing UI, I just prepended tabs at the bottom edge of the app frame.

Details ↗

Right-Click Menu ↗

Existing right-click menu now includes options such as “Go to Artist in New Tab” and “Go to Album in New Tab”. This would be a subtle introduction for the most advanced/curious users while the left-click interaction would stay unchanged.

Once in a new tab, the player would behave the same. Whatever was playing would continue playing.

Two Tabs, Whoa ↗

But here’s something new. A track played from the opened tab would load up in the main player. The previous track would stop and stay in the previous tab. Notice small “Play” and “Stop” icons in the right corner of the tabs.

Track Played From the Second Tab ↗

This would allow users to have multiple solid-state spaces for exploration. One of the cool interactions would be triggering play/stop from “tab bar” without even getting into tabs.

Notice that the track is playing from the first tab, while we are still on the second tab. This context could be a bit confusing, but it follows Spotify’s existing pattern of “omni player”. Some compromises should be made. 

Clicking “play” on the selected song from the playlist would continue where it left off, but the same would happen by clicking the tab play icon.

Tab Track Switching ↗

As I said above, something like tabs is probably a very stupid feature that could introduce lots of edge cases and confusion. But it was fun for me to prototype this rough idea and to romanticize the possibilities that could bring into my flow and experience.

→ Go here for detailed screenshots