With care for all things sound

Through a series of workshops and studio sessions with key designers at Spotify, we clarified audio’s role on various touch points and established a concept and strategy to build upon across the entire product family.

Spotify competes with services like Apple Music and Tidal, that offer similar services. Can Spotify use sound in its user communication to differentiate the brand? Use sound to unify and glue different products together? We looked at various touch points like the mobile app, the Spotify carplay experience, Spotify TV app and Spotify connect feature.

We created and documented a framework for audio including audio design principles with a portfolio of tools including signature sound, UI sounds and voice guidelines.

The family of sounds we created are all based on the key brand values of Spotify and go hand in hand with how the brand express their colors, images and tone of voice in copy.

We casted a female voice in several languages to represent that familiar and playful tone, that was first used in the Spotify running experience, but aslo served as a blueprint for future voice communication tools from Spotify,

Test sessions were held at the Spotify London headquarters with Spotify’s internal user testing team.

The voice tonality as well as the family of sounds created were tested against the established brand values on several groups of individuals. Non-users, free-tier users and premium users.