Playgroup | Helping brands build genuine brand equity

Music Discovery

Brief

Shazam is a music discovery engine originally driven by a nifty bit of mobile technology. Identify any piece of music by dialing the four numbers running up the middle of your phone-hold up the handet to the music and hey presto Shazams music brain identifies the track and stores it online.

Originally Shazam approached Playgroup to look at refreshing their branding and redesigning their website. Along the way we picked up this brief to design an immersive environment that aimed to provide a visual metaphor for their mobile-based music discovery service.

Solution

This project turned out to be as much of a cerebral exploration of inner space as outer space. Working out how to display large quantities of related data in a visually appealing relevance-related structure was a head bursting challenge.

In the end we came up with a typographically driven cosmos of artists or tracks orbiting around your search. The most relevant were determined by visual proximity and scale. Click on one and the universe reorganises itself providing a fascinating infinite journey.

We created two display methods - Cluster, as described above, or a Longwave list style view. Each track or artist comes with a mini preview player and can be added to your favourites or take you off to the store.

Playgroup designed and built a flash proof of concept to be plugged into Shazams existing engine.

Results

Awaiting Results.