YouTube Music Artist Roster
An artist manager’s essential companion to help their artists succeed 💪
Role
Design Lead
Date
2023
Challenge
Label and artist managers are often responsible for a roster of artists. The current YouTube model does not support this need. This has been a long-time ask from partners as the music industry moves faster and faster.
Solution
Artist Roster shows users who have access to multiple artists, a view across these channels highlighting key top insights. Artist Roster easily facilitates deep dives into individual artists where attention is needed, and provides easy paths back to the Roster to see across all artists.
The Context
YouTube’s missing tooling gap
Our current Artist tools do not fit how the music industry works. Artists surround themselves with a larger team (average size 15) who help manage day-to-day digital and IRL operations, while they themselves focus on what they do best: making and performing music. Members/managers of this support team come in various shapes and sizes - spanning across private management companies and representatives from labels. These managers can be responsible for in many cases up to 50 artists.
It’s tedious to switch from one channel to another & labels teams cannot compare data/performance across artist roster.
After speaking with label/artist manager partners, here was some of their biggest pain points in articulated in their own words:
“I cannot for the life of me, just seamlessly move between my artists in terms of a full roster….If there’s one thing I can do for the world before I leave is to get this switching channels for a big roster on YouTube. I feel like I’ll be crowned in the industry or something. It’s something that will change lives. It is that important from a label and management perspective.
”
“Logging into every channel is so cumbersome when you have hundreds of artists on a roster...”
“There isn’t a manager/artist portal for YT where I can see all of the analytics for all the artists on the roster?”
“Wondering how to access and look at analytics across our entire roster, and wondering how to group multiple artists together. Make it easier than logging out of one channel and into another.”
The Opportunity
Enabling artist managers to manage rosters of artists is a top music industry ask.
With Artist Roster, managers can:
See insights across artists
Easily understand who to focus time on
Easily navigate between artists
Access a single hub for performance metrics
Entrypoint
Accessing Artist Roster
If an artist manager has delegate access to more than 1 artist channel, they will have Artist Roster enabled and are able to access it from their Studio dashboard.
Critical User Journey 1
As an artist manager, I would like to know which artists I should focus my time on, based on performance indicators.
Upon entering the Artist Roster, managers are greeted with the information that is most relevant and timely to them.
Artists trending upward
Artist trending downward
Top songs in Shorts
They are looking for artists to focus their time on. Trending upward/downward helps them know what actions to take based on recent activity. For trending upward/downward, artist managers are also given an indication of what the biggest contributor might be to the upward/downward movement. This will give them higher fidelity on these insights to make a decision on if they want to drill down further into the individual artist’s analytics.
Critical User Journey 2
As an artist manager, I would like to easily understand the performance of all the artists I manage.
For an artist managers, key performance indicators like view count, trending songs, and songs in Shorts activity are integral to knowing what to drill-down on and view in more detail.
On the Insights tab, there is the ability to view all artists trending upward or downward in a detailed list view.
On the Artists tab, artists are sorted automatically in alphabetical order. This is a huge enhancement from the clunky legacy experience of account switching. On each of the artist tiles, there are views and unique viewer metrics present for managers to easily scan. They can also sort the list by these metrics if there is a particular theme they are looking to focus on.
Critical User Journey 3
As an artist manager, I would like to easily navigate between the analytics of the artists I manage
Making it easy to switch back and forth between artists is super important to the workflow of artist managers. However, acting on behalf of an artist requires a lot of responsibility and weight. I designed the experience to make it clear that they are acting on behalf of the artist and signed in as an artist manager. There is a quick link back to the artist roster when they are done looking at an individual artist’s analytics.
Visioning
Giving artist managers high-level insights and easy access to view their artists’ analytics and act on their behalf is essential. However, with the music industry moving faster than ever, how can we cut through the noise even more?
We need to build an industry-leading tool that becomes integral to a managers’ day-to-day workflows and makes it easy to take action.
Insights Tab
Artist Tab
Feed Tab
Why does this matter?
Solving one of the biggest industry pain points
It is integral to furthering the symbiotic relationship between YouTube and the music industry by attending to their biggest pain points
Artist Roster is envisioning a tool to go beyond our competitors and become a more useful day-to-day tool to gain insights on performance and actionably affect outcomes.
Artist Roster UX creates an extensible framework that scales well for Artist managers and in the future, multi-channel Creator management use-cases.
The music industry is changing rapidly
The long standing conventions of the music industry are being overturned with new AI tech, short form video content, hyper- shortened release cycles, and breakout music genres globally fueled by social media,
Artists and their teams have an even greater urgency to have a close pulse on how their music is performing and what actions to take next. Artist Roster is the beginning solution to this need.