The Problem
Musicians love making music. But that's not all that you need in order to have a successful career. These days, musicians are pushed to make video-based content for platforms like Instagram and TikTok in order to increase their chances of their music getting heard. However this often gets in the way of the creative process for musicians. There needs to be a way to make content-creation more seamless for musicians to keep them in their creative flow.
The Process
While working at Layers, we did a lot of user discovery. I ran sessions with musicians to see how they currently made video content and what roadblocks they were facing. We also had a beta testing group I ran on Discord to try engage our heaviest users and have them test new features. Also, I had one-on-one onboarding sessions with people who were hearing about us for the first time.
We got a lot of input from users, through the means I mentioned above as well as through our support pipeline. I tracked all of this through Zendesk's issue tracking system (which needs work by the way) and incremented each issue / request we received with a corresponding Asana ticket.
The Product
Layers is a suite of four tools which make it easier to create and share video-based musical content. It starts with the mobile app, Layers Capture, which allows you to connect your camera on your phone with a plugin for Ableton Live called Layers Record. The musician can then film themselves with Capture and Record while recording audio into Ableton Live.
Once the musician has a project that they're happy with, they can import the Ableton project into Layers Edit, a video editing application. Here, the videos and audio are all automatically synced up so the musician doesn't have to manually line everything up themselves. There are audio-reactive visual effects which the musician can apply to make more visually appealing videos. Then once they're done, they can upload to all the usual platforms, or to to the Layers Social platform where other musicians are posting their work.
