Andrew Glassett

01 / The Orchard / Sony Music

Royalty payments for music labels

Role
Lead Product Designer
Skills
Figma, User Research, Prototyping, Market Research
Length
12 months
Status
Shipped; iterations continue
Collaborator payments product overview

The problem

The Orchard wanted to keep its customers, and created a three-pronged approach for doing so:

  • Provide better business intelligence
  • Provide better tools for managing content
  • Offer accounting tools that set us apart from competitors

How might we provide accounting tools that help our customers better run their business?

Competitive analysis

The Orchard was competitive in its product offering except for one key area: paying out royalties.

Feature comparison grid against competitors
We matched most of the market, but had one glaring miss.

Soliciting user feedback

The first step was to recruit users and learn how they work: how much detail they need, the size of their business, how many artists they manage, what format they use for statements, and how they currently calculate royalties.

Recruiting banner for the user study

The results confirmed our problem statement. Users ranked royalties as the most important need.

Bar chart of feature importance with royalties ranked highest

We heard feedback that pointed us toward concepts worth testing:

“Being able to split our net revenue by release to pay band members would be great.”

“Would love the option to input artist / campaign expenses within The Orchard.”

“Really looking forward to see how you include a royalty tool which would take away tons of work, as we still do royalties by hand for each product. :)”

Pain points

Through a series of interviews with defined personas, we confirmed the pain points of each user type:

Sony Music logo
Record label — “Accounting is getting complex, and doesn’t provide returns. More technology is needed, and I’m not great at that.”
The Orchard logo
Distributor — “I can do the technology, but customers don’t know me as an authority when it comes to accounting.”
Portrait of an artist
Customer — “We are spending too much time and money figuring out how much we are owed and who we have to pay.”
Portrait of a musician
Collaborator — “It takes forever for me to get paid, and I’m not sure it is clear that I’m getting the right amount.”

Designs

After synthesizing the feedback, I designed the interface we used for further testing. Once we were happy with the results, I helped develop and launch the product.

Onboarding welcome screen
A friendly welcome mattered: setup was complex and we needed to build trust.
Revenue split configuration screen
Customers decide how revenue is split across collaborators.
Payment generation screen
When a payment period ends, the customer generates payments to send to collaborators.

Customer feedback

We received a variety of feedback, and it was great to see wins like this one:

Customer message praising the collaborators tool

What we learned

01. Adoption was lower than expected

  • Customers with a small number of collaborators may not need this product
  • Some labels pay upon receipt of invoice and don’t need batch payments
  • Labels have existing payment methods they are happy with and are reluctant to change

02. Customers weren’t using the payments portion

  • Confusion and time issues around the process with Wise, the payment processor
  • Lack of understanding of the funding process
  • Some territories were not supported by Wise
Summary table of quantitative results by user segment