The App For Music Discovery

As SPIN’s Creative Director, it was my role to relaunch the legacy print brand with a digital focus. I started by creating a new product - The SPIN play app for iPad. I led the design and development of the ground-breaking app, which featured song streams, video clips, daily music news and cutting-edge journalism in an intuitive experience.

Shortly after the iPad launched, publishers shifted from print to digital to the accommodate to the new medium, but most were merely porting PDFs of their magazines to the tablet. What I saw was an incredible opportunity for SPIN in particular. For the first time you could listen to music and watch videos while reading magazine content all on the same device.

The SPIN Play app was created by the merging of the best content from SPIN magazine with a steady feed of news and reviews delivered directly from spin.com. A unique and seamless user experience was key to the app's success. SPIN Play put music discovery at the forefront, letting users watch, read about and stream music picked by the editors at SPIN.

As a result, SPIN Play had 100k downloads in the first 90 days, it was featured in a television commercial for Apple’s iPad 2, recommended by The New York Times, USA Today, Mashable and Gizmodo and recognized as 'App of the Year' by The Society of Publication Designers.

“A Magazine You Can Listen To” SPIN Play was featured in this television commercial for Apple’s iPad 2