“Not quite AI, but it’s getting there. The music app space is crowded, but there’s a lot of utility and potential in this one. A project I wish I had worked on.” —juror Winston Binch
“This app includes some nice tools for the discovery of new music.” —juror Eric Karjaluoto
Overview: Streaming music services lack heart. Algorithms aren’t enough to fix the problem. To deliver the perfect music for the moment, you need actual humans to help select the songs, humans who are driven by a passion for music. That was the brief that Jimmy Iovine and Trent Reznor gave R/GA—design a revolutionary new service that combines technology with human curation and create a new way to experience music.
• Beats Music offers a library of more than 20 million songs that can be streamed on demand.
• A personalization system combines algorithmic recommendations based on users’ listening habits with suggestions from human curators and playlists created by music industry pros.
• The Sentence is a feature that lets users create playlists by filling four blanks in a sentence with words describing genres, activities, people and moods.
Comments by R/GA:
What is the purpose of the project? “Beats Music is a new company founded by the people behind Beats by Dre headphones. The clients are incredibly successful at creating electronics, but this was their first time developing a digital product. We created a product worthy of the Beats brand that represents the next step of music’s evolution—iconic, connected to culture, with a user experience that feels warm and human while being highly intuitive and easy to use. We designed communications to express the humanity of the service.”
Was the project part of a larger promotional campaign? “We tackled the entire problem, from branding and naming to designing the user experience and interface to marketing in digital, retail, social, events and broadcast, including the Super Bowl. We created a multichannel campaign that launched Beats Music to the masses on multiple levels.”
What were the results? “Beats Music became the number one music app in iTunes on the first day of launch. There were thousands of mentions in the press, millions of social media impressions, and incredible reviews in the music and tech publications.”
