We are tasked with creating a music app with 3 screens by using illustration. The 3 screens must be a dashboard, playlist and track screen.
The first thing to look at is my competition, other music apps. There’s several apps I can look at but I think the most important ones are Apple Music, Spotify and Soundcloud. The other music apps available out there are Amazon Music, Youtube Music, Beatport, Tidal and Deezer off the top of my head. I think based on features alone Spotify is the main one to look at as from my current knowledge it has the most features out of any of the competitors.
Personally I use Apple Music and Soundcloud and have done for many years.
The main reasons I use Apple Music are I get it for free, i’m familiar with it and I have around 4-5 thousand songs downloaded in which I wouldn’t want to build up again on another app. I will say Apple Music is severely lacking in features compared to Spotify, such as playlist curation, in-app EQ, etc. Spotify also has the shared playlist feature where two or more people can create a playlist, I’m unsure if Apple Music has this, however I wouldn’t even find it beneficial as all my friends all use Spotify.
I exclusively use Soundcloud for electronic music as this is the platform that all electronic music artists use for uploading tracks and remixes. Soundcloud also doesn’t have a typical copyright agreement like Apple Music or Spotify so artists can upload songs that include copyrighted material without having to clear them. I also use Soundcloud to upload as they offer a subscription at £9.99 where you get all standard benefits plus unlimited hours of uploading, I use this to upload my DJ sets from time to time. As I upload songs onto Soundcloud it’s great for finding new music as artists and record labels can either make the track a direct free download or link to a download page, using websites such as Bandcamp, who allow smaller artists to upload their music and people can buy and download their songs easily. Similar to Apple Music I have thousands of songs on Soundcloud and a lot of them aren’t available anywhere else due to copyright.