But these were not enough information. To understand how people actually relate to music or how listening music together affects our relationship with someone, I wanted to go little bit dipper to the roots and so that, I started doing some research over the internet related to the topic and I found out that some neuroscience report says that, listening to music or singing together, directly affects the neurochemical of the brain which helps to build closeness and connection towards the other person. Also, while doing this in a group, it affects one’s sense of belonging in a group, creates positive association with other members and helps to build and improve empathy, trust and cooperation with cultural cohesions among each other.

Competitive Analysis

Having all these things in mind, I started doing the competitive analysis to understand what are the other apps in the market which are focusing on the same area in some or the other manner.

Competitive Analysis — Apple Music, Gaana, Saavn

I mainly considered Apple Music, Gaana and Saavn to understand what kind of social features they are providing to their users and I found some interesting things. The main reason behind picking these apps was that, I am frequent user of these apps and I had a pretty good idea of what kind of social features are provided by a particular app. So, it was easier to get the most information without wasting much more time in getting familiarise with the app.

Apple Music — Allows us to see what our friends are listening to or watching. It also recommends other people who has the same music taste as ours and allows us to follow them.

Gaana — Gaana is one of the most used music app in India because of it’s largest collection of Indian songs. If we talk about the social features provided by Gaana, it allows us to follow our social friends but, it has a really interesting feature of ‘Memories’. It shows us the same songs listened by you and your friend as a memory created amongst each other and in some or the other manner, it helps us to understand more about that person and their music taste.

Saavn — Saavn is again one of the amazing music apps used in India because of its collection, early releases and industry acceptance and fame. Saavn provides all the features mentioned above in Apple Music and Gaana but, it is one step ahead of them. It allows users to tag their friends in songs, playlists and albums and tagged users can reply to the comments which are nested . It allows frictionless music sharing with others compared to other ways of sharing in Spotify. You can read more about it here.

Primary Research

After completing the secondary research, it was time to understand the problems of the actual users. So, I started doing my primary research around this feature. I talked to 4 different users of different nationalities (USA, Spain, Sweden and Saudi Arabia) The main reason of it was to understand their culture and their preferences for their personal music. All the participants who were a part of the research were millennials because during my secondary research I found that majority of the audience of Spotify is the millennials and so I thought that, those are the best people to target as they are our ‘Online Generations’ who likes to party together and values their relationships. The interviews were 20–30 minutes long where, 2 were taken in personal and 2 were remote interviews.

User Demographics

And, it led me to find that some people are very personal to their music. They hardly use any kind of social feature. For them, their music is their own, very personal! They hardly share it with others or hardly see that what others are listening to. But, some of them are very outgoing about that. They like to share their music with different people as well as, they are willing to listen what is recommended to them.

This user research led me to identify some patterns and behaviour as well as reasons behind using Spotify Premium as well.