Spotify Live
Spotify Live (formerly Greenroom) let select creators broadcast to their fans, but it lived in a separate app. To grow it, we needed to bring the listening experience into the main Spotify client, so people could hear live content without installing anything new. I ran program management and GTM strategy and worked across research, UX, and content on a core team of about twenty.
what we heard
To understand how people thought about live audio, the team ran a run of user research sessions. A few things came back loud and clear.
- Most users did not know Spotify had a live offering, and were confused about needing a second app to hear it.
- Live content was hard to discover, and there was no way to see when a creator would be live in the future.
- Notifications were non-negotiable for timely content.
- People who wanted to interact would happily switch apps. People who just wanted to listen wanted one app.
the real barriers
Two problems mattered more than the rest: navigating between apps, and discoverability. That narrowed the work to three user stories.
- As a user, I want to find live content without downloading a new app.
- As a user, I want to know what shows are going live and when.
- As a user, I want a reminder when a show I like goes live.
Mapping the journey for links shared out of Spotify, on mobile and desktop, so the entry point behaved predictably no matter where someone landed.
where live could live
We knew integration was the answer. Now we knew what it needed to be: an entry point tied to a specific show or creator, with the interactive room staying in the standalone app for trust and safety. That meant designing the educational upsell too, and an easier onboarding for anyone who did want to jump in.
what we tested
Three pieces went into testing.
- Entry points on artist and podcast pages, with two states: upcoming and currently live, styled to stand apart from the rest of the page.
- A live room page in-app, with the option to be upsold to the full Live app. The CTA landed on the now-playing page so people could engage with the content in a familiar place first.
- Notifications, set up in advance and deployed when rooms went live, targeted to users with high affinity to related creators.
notifications
In-app and lock-screen notifications when a room went live, so timely content actually reached people in time.
soft launch
We launched an MVP to stress-test live listening in the main app, get a baseline read on the funnel, and shape the next phases.
- Mobile only, iOS and Android.
- Select owned-and-operated shows first, adding more once there was momentum.
- Limited marketing and promo to start.
In parallel we built the case for what came next: strategies to scale to more surfaces, creators and platforms, validated future iterations, and end-to-end designs for later phases.
