Music-streaming services are losing their brand identity. Here's the visual evidence

By: Cherie Hu

Published: 2021-01-11

Has anyone noticed recently that all music-streaming services are starting to look and feel the same?

Two pieces of evidence this week hit the nail on the head for me.

First, Jack Appleby, strategy director at R/GA, discovered that the Instagram grids of Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music and YouTube Music were nearly indistinguishable. As you can see in his screenshots below (included with his permission), the majority of posts on each of the grids consist of a well-known artist’s face against a white or solid-colored background — with almost no signals to help identify the services themselves.

Appleby’s post paralleled a trend I had begun to notice outside of social media — namely, that the user interfaces (UIs) of these major streaming services were also increasingly imitating each other.

This has certainly been the case with playlist curation. For instance, in the years since the launch of Spotify’s Discover Weekly and Daily Mix playlists, virtually every other major competitor has come up with their own version of a personalized, algorithmic, regularly-updated mix (e.g. Deezer’s Flow, YouTube Music’s Your Mix, Amazon Music’s Your Soundtrack, Tidal’s My Mix and Apple Music’s For You section). As a result, I would argue that personalization is no longer an effective product differentiator for the mass-market music consumer.

Appleby’s post inspired me to investigate this UI homogenization further. I took screenshots of the iOS homepages of Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music, YouTube Music and Deezer, and laid them out side-by-side.

Indeed, they look almost exactly the same:

When compared in this way, a clear formula for the modern music-streaming app jumps out immediately. You need a “new releases” section and a “for you” section; playlists for specific genres (e.g. hip-hop/rap, indie rock, pop) and moods (e.g. partying, working out, feeling good); a carousel format for scrolling through both albums and playlists, which are represented by squares; a menu bar at the bottom of the screen with icons for home, search and a personal library/collection of favorites; and a minimalist, black-and-white, “dark-mode” interface at large.

What’s more, due to the nature of the services’ licensing agreements with major labels,  analogous genre- or mood-focused playlists across services feature more or less the same artists, adding yet another layer of homogeneity on the content level.

This feels especially strange to me considering that these services are also now investing in non-music content to separate themselves from the competition — think Spotify’s Canvas video feature and expanding podcast slate, or Apple Music’s exclusive video documentaries — that could potentially be better reflected in their UIs.

But when you compare their iOS pages for videos and podcasts (see below), they still seem nearly indifferentiable, conforming to many of the same formulaic elements I outlined above. These services seem to have shifted to optimizing for engagement with surface-level content and features, without investing in improving the underlying system as a whole.

These two sources of homogeneity — of Instagram branding, and of mobile UI — tell me that the unique brand identities of these music-streaming services are quickly eroding, which is perhaps an indication of the market becoming more commoditized and saturated.

In the words of Kathryn Wheeler, a brand identity is “the personality of your business and a promise to your customers.” It consists of a combination of visual and experiential elements that communicates a given company’s voice, value proposition and intended emotional response to a general audience. In a world of short-circuited attention spans, a brand identity is also arguably table stakes for staying competitive on the Internet.

This isn’t necessarily to say that the mobile homepage is the most vital part of a music-streaming service’s user experience or identity. In fact, you could argue that the ideal streaming experience these services are striving for don’t have users looking at their phone screens at all, but rather have them listening to music in the background of other activities for hours on end — i.e. you could argue that listening in and of itself is the critical user experience, not the visual app that gets you there.

But it’s nonetheless amusing to me that multiple streaming services seem to have given up entirely on trying to differentiate on what users see the moment they first open their apps, which is still an important moment in any user journey.

An explanation from design

How did we get to this incredibly boring point? After doing some research, I’ve found that two of the most useful and illuminating explanations come from outside the music industry.

Zooming out, the homogenization of streaming is actually a subset of a larger trend of several major software apps looking more alike over time.

In 2016, designer Michael Horton, calling this trend “complexion reduction,” pointed out how the apps of companies like Airbnb, Instagram and Medium were all moving towards simpler icons, bolder headlines and black-and-white UIs (sound familiar?). Similarly, OH no Type Co.’s viral tweet from 2018 showed how the company logos of Google, Airbnb, Spotify and Pinterest had all morphed from unique, standout designs to much more standardized, rounded, sans-serif fonts.

Designers have argued that in a world of visual over-stimulation and chaotic, short-term attention spans, standardization and genericity are actually valuable because they imply consistency, which implies reliability.

“Impact and, most of all, clarity, have become keywords for all brands,” Thierry Brunfaut, partner and creative director at Base Design, told Fast Company in February 2018. “All these bold and neutral logos are telling the consumer the same message: Our brand and our services are simple, straightforward, and clear. And extremely readable.”

This argument also makes sense for the music-streaming world, which loves throwing around buzzwords like “frictionless” and “seamless.” If the goal of a streaming interface is to make the time between when someone wants to listen to music and when they press play as “frictionless” as possible, any confusing design or sense of unfamiliarity could potentially stand in the way of getting that job done.

Unfortunately, that mentality results in stripping music-streaming apps of any sense of quirkiness or idiosyncrasy that might have been part of their original brands, as they try to compete for a larger share of mainstream audiences’ listening time.

An explanation from sociology

Another explanation for the homogenization of music streaming comes from a decades-old concept in sociology known as institutional isomorphism.

Sociology professors Paul DiMaggio and Walter Powell first laid out their theory of isomorphism in a 1983 paper for the American Sociological Review — aiming to understand why organizations in a given industry tend to become more and more homogenous “in structure, culture, and output” over time, due to a mix of both external and internal forces.

I won’t dive too deeply into the theory here, but wanted to point out two of their key hypotheses that have a direct connection to the current state of music streaming, nearly 40 years later.

One is the power of uncertainty in encouraging imitation among companies within an industry. “When goals are ambiguous, or when the environment creates symbolic uncertainty … organizations tend to model themselves after similar organizations in their field that they perceive to be more legitimate or successful,” write DiMaggio and Powell.

There are multiple examples of this mimetic behavior in the tech industry in general — most notably when Instagram outright copied Snapchat’s Stories feature, which ended up eating into the latter’s market share and whose format has since been replicated across a number of apps, including Facebook, YouTube and Spotify.

I hypothesize that a similar dynamic happened in music streaming, whereby successful early movers like Pandora and Spotify brought forth new, innovative ways of curating and presenting content to music fans, after which all the corporate-subsidized late movers (Apple Music, Amazon Music, YouTube Music, etc.) had to mimic what tens of millions of people around the world had already become familiar with in order to even have a chance of getting their value proposition across.

A second key argument in the theory of institutional isomorphism is that centralization of resources encourages imitation by outside coercion. “The greater the extent to which an organizational field is dependent upon a single (or several similar) source [sic] of support for vital resources, the higher the level of isomorphism,” write the authors.

This concept is especially relevant to the world of recorded music, where 65% of “vital resources” for streaming services — i.e. the most desirable and most popular artists and their catalogs — are concentrated within just three major labels. As a result, competing services will go to those few labels to get their most valuable inventory, and, as part of licensing negotiations, will likely prioritize those artists in their marketing and curation, resulting in a somewhat homogenized content experience across platforms.

Three paths forward for music-streaming brands

So if music streaming services’ brand identities can no longer be found in the actual services themselves, where can we find them?

There are three potential answers — each with its own downside:

1. The artist

To revisit the beginning of this piece: All of the music streaming services’ Instagram grids feature mostly artist faces front-and-center, against solid backgrounds — nothing about the service itself, nor about user behavior.

In other words, the only “brand identities” that these services have going for themselves are just the artists’ own brand identities. Beyond Instagram, this is also evident in the kinds of marketing campaigns that streaming services are pursuing directly with artists and labels — e.g. Spotify Singles and the 21 Days podcast, or both Spotify and Apple Music expanding into live shows.

But as Jack Appleby pointed out on Twitter, while one could argue that “an artist-only approach is correct for a category leader (Spotify, Apple Music) or a challenger (Amazon Music, YouTube Music) … it can’t be right for every single one of them.” Plus, by adopting an artist-only approach, the services are implicitly deferring their own status and brand priority to that of major labels and artists, which isn’t a good look if they’re aiming to attract and retain new subscribers.

2. The user

I find it funny that a lot of music-streaming services would describe themselves as consumer-facing offerings, but rarely acknowledge their own customers in their own advertising; instead, as discussed above, they prefer to focus on marketing artists, whom they don’t own.

The big exception to this pattern is Spotify, which regularly incorporates user data into its marketing through out-of-home billboards as well as online campaigns like the annual Wrapped recaps. The ingenious shareability of Spotify Wrapped doesn’t just create online buzz and impressions for the service; it also drives millions of downloads.

Other exceptions include those services who own not just the software for music streaming, but also its hardware delivery systems — which users need in order to make good use of their streaming accounts in the first place. For instance, Apple’s penchant for music is implicitly advertised in commercials for the Apple AirPods and HomePod, which tend to highlight users’ rather than artists’ experiences (although HomePod ads have previously featured the likes of FKA Twigs).

I think services should lean more into user-centric branding in the future; after all, while mainstream content catalogs are highly centralized, the global landscape of music fans is not. This shift could potentially take the form of serving more niche kinds of fan communities and behaviors, instead of just the artists and music companies at the top of the industry food chain.

3. The parent company

This isn’t a new argument, but has salience in the context of this piece: I think “pure-play” services like Spotify and Deezer who don’t have a big-tech parent are in an increasingly difficult position in the global streaming landscape, because they don’t have access to a more diversified, hybrid hardware/software ecosystem that they fully own and control, unlike Apple Music and Amazon Music.

As the streaming services’ catalogs and interfaces become more homogenized, I’ve noticed that their brand identities — not just their financial incentives — are also morphing into those of their parent companies.

Let’s walk through some examples:

The international (read: non-Western) streaming landscape is also increasingly defined by the brands and incentives of its conglomerate parents: Tencent Holdings for Tencent Music, ByteDance for Resso, Reliance for JioSaavn, Kakao for Melon, the list goes on. By financial necessity, “pure-play” is the exception rather than the rule.

The benefits of association with these conglomerates often comes in the form of price accessibility via telco bundles or integrations with other owned social and software services. Moreover, international apps have many UI features that aren’t as familiar to Western audiences, such as leaderboards and direct artist tipping. I wouldn’t be surprised if some Western services took a nod from its international counterparts and implemented these kinds of features, in order to escape the current homogenized trap into which they’ve dug themselves.

If companies like Amazon Music gain more influence globally, some of the most exciting streaming interfaces could also be happening beyond the phone entirely, through smart speakers and other voice-enabled experiences. As Yazin Akkawi wrote for Inc in August 2018: “Limiting what we consider to be good design to only what we see on a screen is, at a minimum, undermining the possibilities of what we dream up for the future.” It will most likely be the tech companies with the most capital and the most access to sprawling, experiential tech ecosystems who will be building that future for the music industry — not the pure-play services.  🌊