Create and market a fun "fantasy sports for music" experience
Creative direction, branding, UI/UX design, web design, socials
Studio Cadenza 2019–present
SongPicks is a real-money gamified music platform, modeled after daily fantasy sports, that lets music fans bet on tomorrow's hits. Players enter contests with real cash, pick the songs they believe will blow up by the end of the week, and compete for real cash prizes to prove they know music best. Users play SongPicks for the thrill of the wager and the chance to turn music instinct into real winnings against friends and the community.
Our task has always been to build a trustworthy product, market it well, and deliver contests that feel fair and exciting enough to be worth the buy-in. How can we best understand our audience and their personas? How do we acquire new users and hook them enough to make that first cash entry? and keep them coming back? And how do we keep growing and building trust as a real-money platform?
Built as FanLabel's sister product, SongPicks inherited that same bold styling while carving out its own identity. FanLabel’s task was to always feel fun and competitive, while SongPicks was designed to feel even more determined, yet luxurious and high end. Similar to FanLabel, both products utilize the same tones to pair with set of genres, with more gold and green being present in the branding to represent the return on players’ investment.
SongPicks takes the daily fantasy sports formula, the kind of energy you'd find in FanDuel, DraftKings, Yahoo Fantasy Sports, or ESPN Fantasy Sports, and brings that into the music industry. A small cash entry is all it takes to sign songs to a fantasy record label, with real stream data across every major platform determining who wins. The bigger the ear for a hit, the bigger the potential payout, all from a modest buy-in. Getting the format right meant digging into what makes competitors' apps tick, then figuring out how to translate that same competitive, high-stakes energy into something built for music fans specifically. We’re serving both music fans and competitive gamers alike. This becomes the framework for how music challenges, climbing the leaderboard, and that familiar feeling for users will lead to success.
