Artist Pinning
InstagramI worked on ways for artists to recognize the fans making Reels with their music, giving people a more personal reason to create.
We wanted to help artists reach fans while supporting Reels’ focus on original creation. Alerts about new releases could attract attention, but that attention wasn’t reliably turning into people making a Reel.
I helped shift the team’s focus toward artist recognition: giving artists a simple way to highlight fan-made Reels using their music.
We developed Artist Pinning and started with a small group of artists before expanding. The work moved our thinking from promoting a release toward helping artists encourage participation.
Design explorations from the original Artist Pinning deck (2022), with Tyler Gross, Josh Fox and Emily Yao. These are proposal screens, not current Instagram screenshots.
From knowing a song to making something with it
The project sat between two priorities. Music partners wanted artists and their releases to be more visible, while the Reels team wanted to encourage people to create original content. My role was to help find an experience that could serve both, rather than treating visibility as the end goal.
Our earlier approach, Drops, notified people about new music from artists they cared about. People opened the notifications, but we weren’t seeing that interest consistently turn into creation. Knowing a song was out didn’t necessarily give someone an idea for a Reel or a reason to make one.
We explored playlists, music discovery experiences and further changes to notifications. Artist Pinning gave us a different hypothesis to test: recognition from an artist could be meaningful enough to encourage a fan to participate. It also gave us a smaller starting point than building a new discovery destination.
Making recognition part of the experience
The original designs placed the interaction on a song’s audio page and in the Reels viewer. An artist could select a fan’s Reel and pin it to the audio page, where other listeners would see it marked as an Artist Pick. That made the connection between the song, the artist and the fan’s work visible.
We also had to think about how people would learn what had happened. The designs explored education for artists, a notification for the creator whose Reel was selected, and how the pinned content would appear to other viewers. Each part mattered: the artist needed a straightforward action, and the fan needed to understand that their work had been recognized.
For me, the useful lesson was to look more closely at the gap between attention and participation. A person can love an artist’s music and still need a reason to put themselves into the experience. This work gave us a way to explore that motivation through the relationship between artists and fans.
Product: Neil Sethi. Design deck: Tyler Gross, Josh Fox and Emily Yao.