PLEDGEMUSIC STOREFRONTS

Designing customized artist-to-fan connections

PledgeMusic was an online, direct-to-fan music platform. Artists can create campaigns to promote and sell a variety of merchandise and unique experiences.

Fans want more authentic connection

In today's crowded music market artists and fans are looking for unique ways to connect with one another. Listening to music has become a passive activity for many which promotes fans being less connected to artists they love. Connections outside the act of just listening such as attending a concert or buying an exclusive item signed by the artist are where fans find a ton of value and connection.

The goal

Create a platform that would allow the artist's team to take an existing PledgeMusic campaign and easily generate a customized, standalone storefront website.

This would allow artists to have more control over their brand, easily spin up an evergreen website that can be customized based on their needs, and give fans more authentic access to their favorite artists.

PledgeMusic home page.

Campaign pages. The artist brand is overshadowed.

My role

I led the design for the two sides of the experience. On one side we had the storefront builder (artist side) which needed to be easy and intuitive to use. On the other side I designed the campaign site template for the fans.

I was responsible for outlining user flows, wireframing, visual design, prototyping, and establishing a system of customizable modules.

Just enough research

I worked closely with my product manager to conduct research which consisted mostly of face to face interviews with artists, managers, and labels. As you can imagine, qualitative data was paramount here and some themes emerged.

Easy to use and the ability to quickly spin up a customized storefront.

A variety of modules to highlight merchandise and experiences.

White label the experience from storefront to checkout to focus more on the artist and less on PledgeMusic.

We also utilized quantitative data on which campaigns were most successful and had the most visits to the campaign to make some informed assumptions about what would resonate best with fans. This helped inform the feature set for the site builder.

Defining the system

I worked closely with my product and engineering partners to outline what we should build within our resource constraints.

Componentizing each piece of the storefront was key as it helped keep scope manageable and defined reusable and repeatable patterns.

We established a short list of module types which included a hero, navigation, product grid, featured, and video. Within that set we enabled  flexibility around fonts, colors, and layout variations.

Mapping out checkout flows between the PledgeMusic website and the storefront site.

Wireframing dashboard modules for the artists side

Wireframing the fan side storefront modules

Bringing all to life

Working closely with the engineering team to get to a working version of the builder I found it incredibly easy to spin up a variety of unique sites.

The artist was now front and center. 

Fan-facing storefronts

Debranded (PledgeMusic) checkout

The artist dashboard needed to be simple and easy to use.

Just enough customization capabilities.

Results

With an overwhelmingly positive response, the PledgeMusic Storefront became an important tool in the Sales team's arsenal. It gave the artists and their teams features they had been asking for and in turn were more prone to choose Pledge over the competition.

We saw an initial 20% uptick in campaigns running on PledgeMusic within the first 3 months.

If I had a magic wand

Sadly, I didn't get the chance to iterate on this project but if given the chance I would have...

• Multi-artist architecture. Allow labels or mangement groups to roll up several artists or catalogues into one store.
• Build as a standalone application. Open this tool to any artist.
• Custom URLs. Allows users to connect any URL of their choice.