Image Credit : Rachael Maniord & Jack Murphy.
Project Overview
Wonder is a platform for indie music discovery. It’s a place to find and follow the best new music as soon as it’s released. This pair of native mobile applications aims to provide users with a simple, elegant approach to discovering the best new indie music. Our curation process - a combination of human and technology - sees us surfacing the crème de la crème of Soundcloud each day, within minutes of debut and often before it hits other streaming services. With a design that prioritises simplicity and engagement, the app has been described as “gorgeous” and “streamlined" by the US Apple App Store, where it was featured amongst the ‘Best New Apps’ of 2016. Wonder has also been internationally recognized by TechCrunch, The Washington Post and Netted. To date, the apps have accumulated more than 35,000 downloads worldwide.
Organisation
Team
Eoin McCarthy, Dave Lowry, Kelvin Bulwinkel, Kseniya Williams, Simon Hales, Rachael Maniord, Jack Murphy, Tom Knox, James Gauci, Lachlan Kirkwood.
Project Brief
After Twitter's acquisition of the popular music discovery platform We Are Hunted, part of the Hunted team formed Hydric Media to pursue their passion for using technology to discover and share the best new music. Wonder was born as a web application, and eventually found its way onto both Android and iOS.
The core purpose of the mobile apps was to deliver a method of music discovery that would save users hours each day digging through SoundCloud and Spotify playlists to find the best new music. The user interface needed to be beautifully and simply designed so that the artist content and app functionality was at the forefront to ensure maximum user engagement.
Users should be able to navigate through the application intuitively and quickly. The interface must be one that easily allows avid music lovers the ability to share featured tracks across their favourite social networks, and easily connect with their favourite new artists on social platforms.
Project Need
Music industry tastemakers need to get their hands on the hottest new releases as soon as possible, then share those tracks with the wider world. In our early research phases, we found that in order to gather the tracks they needed and wanted to consume, tastemakers comb through various blogs, streaming music services, online videos and reviews for hours on end to come up with just a few tracks to enjoy and share.
It might be so that these obsessive characters will continue to spend hours a day doing so regardless of technology! However it was clear to the Wonder team that a machine-learned, human-supported music discovery application can add a multiplier to their productivity by adding a data-driven qualification layer to their Soundcloud exploration.
As the number of new tracks being added to Wonder daily is easily consumed in less than twenty minutes, it made sense that mobile applications should be provided to deliver a short-form, high-quality daily discovery activity.
User Experience
Wonder’s human curation team, in combination with proprietary data-driven quality and popularity indicator algorithms, monitors music on Soundcloud in near-real time, allowing Wonder to highlight the best tracks before they break on other services. The app constantly updates with new content, and superusers often return to the app to check for updates several times throughout the day. New regular notifications alert users when new trending artists have hit the charts.
User sessions often run for extended periods. The average user session streams more than 15 minutes of music.
The app is also designed to retain users even after the initial music discovery phase. It allows users to ‘star’ tracks they discover to save them for later listening, and even create instant playlists based on any track they find on Wonder.
A key to Wonder’s user experience though lies in the ability to share your favourite discoveries and achieve tastemaker status. On hitting 'share', the user is handily given a prepopulated social post on their platform of choice containing the artist and track names, as well as a direct link to listen on Wonder. Not only does this support the tastemaker and the emerging artist, but also drives users back to the source - Wonder.
Project Marketing
By leveraging press contacts within TechCrunch, The Washington Post and Netted, the app achieved featured status on these sites. The app was also reviewed by the US Apple App Store editors for its “gorgeous, streamlined” design and usability and was featured amongst the ‘Best New Apps’ on the App Store home screen in 2016. In a single day, this achieved 15 million impressions of the app icon and saw downloads spike to by more than 2500.
Wonder’s marketing strategy continues to engage target users where they’re most active: on social media platforms. By sharing daily featured content across Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, a forum is created for users to connect with the musicians who power the app. By encouraging conversations around new music discovery, users are empowered to share their discoveries before they’re found elsewhere. The Wonder team also promotes interactive posts and hosts regular competitions so that users are encouraged to engage with the Wonder community. Artists are tagged and encouraged to interact with their newfound Wonder audiences, and those posts often go viral with the artists own fans.
Further, Wonder is the core of a weekly streaming radio segment on London’s Fubar Radio: 'Top 5 with Wonder'. It features several of the latest, hottest tracks discovered on Wonder selected by the show's host, Joey Page. The show exposes the Wonder brand to more than 2.5 million monthly listeners and more than 25,000 social followers.
Project Privacy
Wonder uses the SoundCloud API, ensuring that all sensitive user information is protected by the same privacy and security technologies as this leading streaming music platform. Because users access Wonder either anonymously without a login, or directly using their SoundCloud account, any login information is securely held in encrypted files that are private to the Wonder app. No other personally identifiable information is harboured by Wonder on-device. These privacy practices ensure that all users have the freedom to feel completely safe when using the application regardless of whether they use a log in or not.
Tags
Entertainment
Tech has taken control of our entertainment - it influences what and how we watch or listen to, where and how we eat, dine and play, how we book and how we interact before during and after entertainment events. This category recognizes tech that makes entertainment even more entertaining.
More Details