Ji Zhang's
Portfolio
A Smaller Music Artist & Event Discovery App
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Smaller artists are independent musicians with ≤ 10,000 average monthly listeners.​ This app helps them promote new music and events and enhance business collaboration with venue owners to grow their audience.
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Music consumers use the app to discover new music events and smaller artists to expand their entertainment experience.
All My Homies Hate Ticketmaster.
With that, Zach Bryan titled his Red Rocks live album, criticizing Ticketmaster's unfair ticketing practices. The world's biggest artist, Taylor Swift, even sued the company to advocate for change. Despite that, they have no choice but to continue selling tickets through Ticketmaster. ​
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However, Ticketmaster favors big artists like Zach Bryan and Taylor Swift, they are still the lucky ones.
The Gatekeeping
Ticketmaster, merged with Live Nation, has exclusive partnerships and direct ownership of large venues and event promotion companies. ​
​Problem: Limited event and promotional opportunities for smaller artists, creating barriers to increasing exposure and industry entry.
The Partner In Crime
Spotify, the largest music streaming service, partners with Ticketmaster to promote artist events through built-in redirection.​ However, Spotify's algorithms favor popular and mainstream artists for recommendations, adding to the competition among artists on the platform.
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Problem: External factors, like artist popularity and current trends, create algorithmic bias, limiting smaller artists' exposure to a larger audience.
Potential Solutions
1. Engaging Artist-
Centric Profile
Personalized profile elements to showcase artist bios, discographies, and unique media content
3. Algorithmic Fairness
Random recommendations adjusted using location and personal preferences sans popularity or trend bias
2. Feedback
System
Artists grow through community input and track progress with a statistics tracker.
4. Mutual Gig
Finder
Directly connect venue owners with smaller artists seeking local performance opportunities
How can we help smaller artists to grow their audience?
Branding & Visual Identity
Welcome visitors to your site with a short, engaging introduction.
Double click to edit and add your own text.
User Interviews
“I’d like people to instantly be able to engage with who I am and the music I create.”
“feedback is how I know to continue with a certain style or tweak it to something better.”
“algorithm that pumps popular and unknown artists not based on followers or streams”
“it’s come down a lot to who you know not what you know.”
Process Overview
In spring 2024, I and three teammates (Becca Lebrao, Elizabeth Meschia, & Muhab Mustfa) designed Amplify for our capstone project. Over the summer, I did more research and redesigned the Figma prototype.
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Secondary Research
Competitive Analysis
Persona
Scenarios
User Stories
Site Map
Figma Prototype