“Party” is a shared, continuous radio that spawned from my brain during an actual party, where several people dueled for the DJ’s attention to queue their favorite songs. The concept is simple: a host starts the “Party,” and invited users can add songs to the radio’s queue. Though I'd first drawn up this idea in 2019, the introduction of Spotify's "Group Sessions" encouraged me to revisit the idea, and focus on how it might widen the service's profit margins and user loyalty.
Full access to the feature would be available to premium users only; free users would have a contribution limit of 1 song per session. Invites, the ability to pause and skip songs, and the shuffle option would be available only to the host. Guests would only be able to add 5 songs at a time to the queue. Should the radio come to the end of a queue—easy enough, my social circle often neglects a queue while enraptured in conversation—the radio will add songs according to Spotify’s now-iconic algorithm to match what’s already been played.
At the end of every Party session, users will be presented with a personalized playlist of all the songs they’ve heard for the first time, with the option to add this playlist to their collection. This is where the Spotify-green gets greener. The news that Spotify finally broke even in 2017, 11 years after its launch, surprised me at first, so my focus turned from Spotify’s user base, to the second-most important element of the service: the artists. Here’s one way the app could increase its profits: “Special Guest Stars” in the Party session. Artists whose music matches the algorithm of a Party session in play can pay to have their tracks boosted to the top of the Auto-Queue. In my mockup, I use Petal Supply and TeaMarr as examples; they appear as “special guests” with the Spotify logo superimposed over their artist’s profile photos, indicating that they’ve added tracks to the Auto-Queue. A single 2-hour Party session could, potentially, expose a single user to as many as 20 new songs and artists, which I tested during an informal work function—I was the DJ, a generous one who accepted song requests from anyone. Lesser known artists can expand their audience and ramp up their monthly streams. The feature would also encourage user loyalty; since only Spotify-users can participate, and only premium users have unlimited access, further incentive is generated to switch and stick to Spotify.
A visual mockup via InVision can be experienced here: x.