Over the years, Soundvenue has been growing from a pre-Myspace bands-and-fans community to a highly esteemed media platform, released as a print magazine and on the web, as podcast and with a wide range of various community events.
During the years 2006-2009 I headed a huge redesign of the online platform as the lead UX designer and Product Director. I focused the work on the three major themes of People, Opinions, and Play. For Play we build media players for the discovery of new cutting edge music and video's featuring street fashion, reportages and the community events. For Opinion we strengthened the editorial level and status of the media giving room to more elaborate story formats. And for People we grew the engangement of the community with debates, an interactive event calendar, community events and a members option. The members option based on a subscription structure covering both the print magazine, access to premium benefits online, such as music downloads, discounted registration for concert and parties and web shop discounts.
Especially the subscription concept covering a monthly recurring magazine delivered by mail and range of online benefits was a challenge in the early days of online subscriptions and recurring payments. But over time it became a solid foundation for the economy of the media outlet.
Soundvenue.com, 2009:
The unofficial Danish indie-chart, the weekly High 5 including a build-in voting system.
This was pre-Spotify times and pre-streaming age, so we encountered a few big challenges beyond the core user experience and implementing the design in Flash: Serving music through the web in a performant way and, and managing rights and listening reports in collaboration with artists, labels and the local rights organisation Koda.
A native app for the first generation of iPhones, 2010 featuring an overview of upcoming concerts and events.
The app also featured a community dimension allowing users to keep their own schedule and to share it, to see who else was going to specific events. This also became a way to see which concerts and events was most popular among readers and users.
