Grammofy – Classic(al)

Grammofy was a streaming service designed and developed exclusively for classical music. Based on a unique tagging- and metadata-system that accounted for the special characteristics of the genre, Grammofy offered listeners weekly collections of hand-picked classical music accompanied by spoken word introductions and podcasts.

As with any genre of music, you can go deep. Dive into the nitty gritty, learn all about a specific piece, style of recording or artist. But what do you do if the genre you are looking at spans more than 400 years? Where do you even begin?

Grammofy was an attempt to answer these questions. By providing a fresh and friendly look that said No! to the antiquated and stiff flair that is often associated with classical music. By providing an insightful and engaging spoken explanations for each piece that made learning more about it fun. By bundling together great works under an interesting (and often surprising) theme in weekly collections so that you could make new musical discoveries more easily while still feeling guided.

The App

The app followed a simple drill-down structure:

• A dashboard highlighted this weeks new collection (i.e. „playlist“) and allowed for immediate access to activity playlists – collections that were tailor made to fit into a specific part of your day.
• The collection overview allowed you to browse all previous collections and filter them by specific keywords
• After noosing a collection from the overview or dashboard you reach a single collection page which contains and artwork element, the playlist itself with a short introduction to it
• Each piece in this collection has it’s own works page where you could see and compare different recordings of the same work and read up on it’s history and significance

With this structure we made it incredible easy to literally „dive deeper“. Once you reached the works page checking out different recordings, you had graduated: you were no longer simply just interested in classical music, but an aficionado. In a sense this structure mapped the engagement with the genre perfectly.

At a later stage this simple structure was extended as we experimented with adding radio to the app in order to allow for another entry point, and favourites in ordere to collect and remember your top pieces. On the radio tab you could simply hit play and listen to whatever collection was on rotation right now – no stress of choosing a collection involved, and thus another barrier removed.

Impressions & Memories