Summary
A Spotify feature concept that helps listeners discover emerging artists playing live near them, shaped by user interviews and built on the listening data only Spotify has.
The Opportunity
Do you remember the last time you discovered a new artist completely by accident?
That's always been the story of music discovery, digging through milk crates, sharing mix tapes, blindly downloading discographies on Limewire (not me of course). You'd stumble onto something and it would change your week. Now, with more music, more apps, more algorithms than ever, it's somehow harder to find the right music, the show happening near you, tonight, from someone you've never heard of.
Spotify has 700 million users and knows exactly what you listen to. But find a show three blocks away this Friday? You're on your own.
The Vision
Make it easy to find emerging artists you'll love, playing live near you!
Why This Works?
5 user interviews surfaced the same pattern across personas: fragmented discovery, poor relevancy (Dice recommendations "weren't very relevant"), and missed shows discovered only after the fact
Existing tools solve pieces of this (Dice, Bandsintown) but none use actual listening history, Spotify's unique data advantage that no external platform can access
The moat compounds: every save/dislike/share makes the feed smarter, and it's only buildable from inside Spotify
Data
More quality data to learn from.
Better Matches
Smarter pairing for more relevant results.
More Saves/Shares
Content that connects and gets saved.
Smarter Feed
A feed that gets smarter, for you.
The Bet
60-day NYC beta, scoped to a genre-matched local show feed inside Spotify's existing Live Events hub — built on current API partnerships (Bandsintown, Eventbrite, Ticketmaster), so MVP work is UI, not new infrastructure. Target: 10% of users save 5+ events in 30 days; 8% CTR from save to ticket purchase.
10%
of users save 5+ events within 30 days
8%
CTR from saved event of ticket purchase
One Key Tradeoff
Scoped to emerging artists only (under 100k monthly listeners) rather than all local shows, this keeps Local Pulse differentiated from Bandsintown/Dice rather than competing head-on, and protects the "discover them before they blow up" value prop that's core to the vision.
View the full Project Here:
Mock Ups & Prototypes
Hint: Click Explore.
