At the beginning of my career, I spent a lot of time building custom player experiences for artists. One of the first I really remember was the viewfinder player for Band of Horses Infinite Arms which used the SoundCloud API platform. (Side note: this player was also one of the reasons I ended up being hired by SoundCloud.) From what I remember, the player worked well as it was simply streaming MP3s through an HTML5 <audio> tag but it had one major fault: the band was not getting paid. Yes, this was long before SoundCloud was paying artists and streams driven by custom experiences were considered part of the marketing cost. I stand by that tactic to this day.

Well things didn’t really change in the past 8 years and worst… the SoundCloud platform stopped functioning properly, API keys stop being issued, and I began to lose hope. In the meantime, my business had changed entirely as I began to take on deeper artist problems and worked on becoming an all around smarter Product person. (I’m still working on this.) In that same period of time, Spotify and Apple Music solidified their position as the main services on which fans would experience music. The album page was standardized to fit the expectations of a native app design system and the idea of customization became non-existent. One of the more important innovations to the album became URL redirection services which allowed artists to share a single URL which would direct users to listen to their streaming service of choice. Sad. Artists were slowly losing control over another important property of their career.

And then something amazing happened.

Out of the construction of their own web player experience, Spotify released the Web Playback SDK which promised full audio streaming in 3rd party web apps for fans willing to login with their premium Spotify accounts. Apple Music then followed suit by releasing Music Kit JS for the web which had a Javascript powered music player built right into it. I quickly got to work and developed an engine that exists as a sort of average of both platforms, promising to make full audio streaming available to premium users in the browser. Being experimental, this technique isn’t without issue and I suspect the technology will evolve quickly in the next few years. However, it feels promising considering where we were just two years ago. It’s important that we as developers participate and challenge the possibilities of these audio platforms because their progress opens up more opportunities for artists.

That brings us back to the Ashes of the Wake experience. Could we develop a more tailored alternative to the music service album page using this technology? I had very simple goals that must be met. Namely, the page should be able to be visually customized to better relate to the aesthetic of the release and it should provide all content that the vinyl reissue contains: credits, thanks, lyrics, and photos. However, it should also feel familiar to the existing design systems of album pages so that it’s not so foreign it isn’t accessible. (We’ll save the truly experimental player experiences for later.) I studied these goals and audited the state of album page designs to come up with the following wireframe layout.