I joined Mellomanic as its Founding Designer, reporting directly to the VP of Product. Our goal was to design a platform that let artists create a private space for themselves and their biggest fans. This let the artist and their team test new material, potential merch ideas, connect on lives and listening parties (more on that in a second!), be supported financially directly by fans, and own the valuable feedback and information they would get from their fanbase.

The Problem

The biggest inspiration for us were early Internet spaces — MySpace, individual artist websites in the 00s, Turntable, & more. Spaces that were diluted and eventually mostly disappeared as the Internet grew bigger and more commonplace in every day life. Through primary research with labels and artists, we found this constant spotlight on their every move (or tweet) made it hard to have a place where they could more informally communicate with fans. Every online move is seen as a business move to be approved by everyone who has access to your public social media.

The Road to the Solution

The first 6 months involved fast and heavy iteration, working closely with the CTO, PM, and engineering team, taking a very rough intitial prototype into an alpha for internal and small-scale user testing, and eventually into a full-on, invite-only beta launch. I worked with our A&R and marketing team, analyzing the users’ (both artist teams and fans) feedback and applying it. At the 1 year mark, we launched publicly after much iteration and new feature development. By end of that first year, we had thousands of users. By the time I left on year 3, we had 100k monthly active users and partnerships with multiple labels and A-list artists.

We created unique experiences not seen in other apps, such as Listening Parties — virtual concerts where musicians could show unreleased demos, ideas, new singles, even their favorite songs. Fans could live through moments previously only reserved for live shows: chat with the artist, dance, emote cries and claps, hype certain songs, and even dim all the lights in the LP if enough people held down a virtual lighter.

This was a unique experience product-wise, too. For every fan-facing feature, its Artist Portal counterpart would be carefully thought out and crafted for artist teams to use. It was an exciting challenge designing for B2B and B2C simultaneously, in a way, and having to balance what a superfan would want, as well as what is low-lift and efficient for musicians and their teams to post, and how to let them easily access the most valuable information for their career strategy (their Mellomanic fan email list, payments received, most devoted fans, best performing content, best received content, etc.)