TomatoShark was a disruptor in the music licensing industry. We gave musicians tools to license directly to the end buyer, and built an online marketplace with fresh, original music, limitless potential, and flexible purchasing options for buyers.
Overview
TomatoShark was an online music licensing marketplace that brought together music creators and people who needed music for their projects. We had a unique take on music licensing, and were the first in the industry to allow music creators to run their own stores, à la etsy, and set their own pricing. This opened the door for more diversity than our competitors offered, as well as cheaper prices, and higher quality music.
I conducted deep industry and user research to uncover pain points in the industry, and developed solutions to the problems I found. Behind the basic marketplace tools we created, I developed a flexible, equitable contract system to handle the exchange of rights with each purchase, and a complex, yet easy to use algorithm that helped our sellers automatically price out any licensing scenario (from large placements in major blockbuster films to simple wedding videos).
My title was Product Manager, and I did a wide variety of work on this product. A few of the processes I owned were: design, research, cross-functional collaboration, and legal. Working for TomatoShark was my introduction to design. There was no designer on the team, so I fell into that roll. Over 2 years, I made a lot of mistakes, learned even more, and fell in love with design and product development.
Shoppers were were encouraged to begin their search as their first action on the site.
All songs could be easily previewed and licensed, with no need to create an account.
We kept checkout within the license selection UI to keep it as streamlined as possible. No extra pages.
Research and testing led to a simple two tiered hierarchy for license options.
Shoppers ranged in experience, from first-time music licensers to professionals, so checkout process was made to be simple, educational, but also demonstrate our deep knowledge of music licensing to the user to establish trust.
Screens
Some day I’d like to update this page and write about the research -> design -> production process I had at TomatoShark, but for now I’ll just share some of the finished work.
