Minstrel

Online Radio Service

Minstrel is a streaming music service for music aficionados who want to listen to music based on a mood or feeling, find and delve into new artists, and want more customization for their stream. Minstrel offers a dynamic music exploration experience, allows finding and saving albums, generating of dynamic playlists, and “finding moods” through the ability to create stations from songs. Unlike Pandora or Itunes radio, Minstrel does not specify music by genre or conventional meta-data, and instead uses “mood scores” to pair stations together.

Minstrel is a joint project between designer Erik Evangelista and Ruby-on-Rails developer Nicholas Case. It started as Nicholas' Ruby-on-Rails project idea; as the mood scoring and organization systems materialized, Erik began work on a front-end design to create a user experience inspired by existing patterns to motivate explorative behavior.

We targeted a broad audience of music listeners who used existing streaming services such as Pandora, Spotify, Itunes Radio, etc., while keeping in mind a particular niche.

Minstrel

Minstrel

"I don't want to have to know what I want to listen to."

"I listen to music that resonates with how I feel."

"I don't want to be held down by genre."

Meet Troy Age: 23Musician

Music HabitsTroy’s music tastes vary greatly from the mainstream billboard to the experimental and eclectic. He finds that describing his taste though genres hones in on particular sounds, he finds them somewhat arbitrary and otherwise limiting him from exploring music he would like. He starts to listen to music based on his mood or context, and can be playing anything from millennial party anthems and old-school hip-hop at fun social events to thoughtful classical music and funeral doom metal on dark and stormy nights.Streaming BehaviorTroy uses both Pandora and Spotify, using Pandora to find new music and stream passively, and Spotify to create playlists and listen to full albums. He enjoys how Pandora has discovered artists for him in an automatic way, but finds that his 30+ stations quickly start to repeat themselves. Spotify is a convenient tool when he knows exactly what he wants to play, but wishes that it had a more robust discovery mechanism.

Ultimately, he wishes his streams “knew” the mood being played instead of throwing him a repeat of artists that happen to be in the same genre, even if he doesn’t know what exactly his mood is.

Opportunities

Create a more curated and customizable mechanism to sort music by their mood.

Combine music discovery and playlist functionality to create a more wholesome experience.

Preserve existing patterns that Troy is familiar with.

Troy is a free-spirited individual who has immersed himself in music starting from a very young age. He has a part-time job to support himself, but wishes deep down to have a lifelong career in his passion for music, albeit unrealistic.

Minstrel

Auracle

Case Study

Surveys

Interviews

We interviewed 6 music streaming individuals about their behaviors and opinions

Characteristics divulged:music taste, streaming behavior, music discovery patterns

Findings

Music taste varies a lot, but everyone was driven by particular contexts.

Radio services, though satisfactory, were limiting in the scope of songs provided. Particularly, the streaming algorithms were suspect and obscure.

Like/Dislike is sometimes a hard decision; stations can sometimes be homogenous if artist pool between stations are too related. Lacks nuance.

Allocation of music through huge playlists is very important.

Competitive Analysis

Low-Fi Iterations

Mid-Axure Low-fi Iterations

Thank You