Case Study

Designing an NFT-powered music marketplace: Autonomies

Accompanying the launch of a music NFT platform & DAO

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Briefing:

The challenge was to bring value back to digital audio files, and provide further sources of income for musicians. P2P and streaming platforms have left musicians with very few means of revenue, or rather a tiny trickling down of income for underground artists and a further enrichment of major labels and chart-topping mainstream artists. 

And yet the rise of NFTs suggests a different approach might be possible, reevaluating the way digital music is bought, sold and artists are remunerated. 

Furthermore, NFT powered platforms connect musicians and fans in a completely new way: the curation of tokenized communities allow fans to stake their support in their favourite artists and open new channels of direct communication.

For the first sessions addressing this challenge, we gathered the heads of labels, musicians and DJs, as well as blockchain developers and marketing professionals. 

Challenges:

The aim of the workshop was to align this diverse team on the objectives of a music NFT marketplace à la Bandcamp, but more importantly define a clear product vision and come out with a roadmap.

Process:

Before getting into objectives, we layed out all potential competitors and benchmarked all the other similar solutions we could find and reviewed them together. We then briefly explored the state of the online music sharing industry: such as P2P, vinyl distribution, streaming platforms and VR boutiques. We needed a broad overview of the current landscape, in order to assess where our product would fit within this market.

Sticking to this macro approach, we defined the S.M.A.R.T Objectives of the product. SMART Objectives are defined along the criteria: Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant and Timely. 

Having aligned on several key objectives for this product, we took a look at the target audiences and determined these could be categorised into three types: labels, collectors and artists.

For each of these audiences we created a user journey in order to gain an understanding of the paths they could follow to reach the platform, start interacting with it, and how we could retain them. 

Taking a closer look at our three (frequently overlapping) audiences was our next step: in other words, creating User Personas. For this activity we explored each persona’s pains, gains and Jobs To Be Done, before mapping some of the first product features we believed every persona would expect.

Finally, we prioritized the features for MVP launch and mapped these and the relevant OKRs onto a roadmap — from Ultimate Objectives down to Features and User Stories.

Workshop results:

This workshop kickstarted the entire project, aligned the team on what we were trying to achieve and gave us a roadmap to follow for the months to come. The deliverables included a MVP feature prioritization matrix, an OKR roadmap and a common understanding of the state of the industry and where our product fit in. 

Design deliverables:

After defining the core features, roadmap and key User Stories for our product, we proceeded to wireframing on Figma. The user stories allowed us to check off every potential Job to be Done by a user when navigating each particular screen.

The wireframes were further developed using the teams input and feedback, before finalising the core MVP screens. For final pixel adjustments, modals and states we collaborated with Tiny Beast and finalised all desktop screens:

You can visit the Autonomies DApp by following this link.

Final Result:

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