
Universal Music - March Music Challenge
- Technology Advisors
- Tech Development Team
- Creative Direction and Design
Overview
Universal Music Group is home to the world’s largest catalog of recorded music. Genome was commissioned to produce a responsive destination for their March Music Challenge for the second time since 2014. Built with brackets containing music from various schools in the US, Universal Music Group aimed to capture consumer data while increasing fan engagement by turning their focus toward streaming, the dominant means of consuming music.
UX / UI
This experience was aimed at enticing college students to play and share custom Spotify playlists that represented their schools. Our high-fidelity wireframes provided a clear idea of the content required for this step-by-step composition.

Genome produced a custom backend to create time-based rollout of brackets. The challenging part was squeezing 32 schools into a design that was easily explorable without becoming visually overwhelming.
Every time a school proceeded to a new round, we traced it’s progress by using the school’s color to highlight the name and the progress path.

The playlist page for each school also sported the school colors. Album art from the curated playlist was used in the background graphics which dynamically switched out for every school based on the music that was most popular in that region.
Live polling of social shares, playlist plays, and Spotify follows added to the score for the school. Genome built a logic engine for determining bracket winners based on fan interaction and time.

Website
