Going Unlimited
Transitioning from a transactional marketplace to subscription-based.
Sector: Media & Entertainment, Music Production & Licensing
Challenge: Redesigning the existing pricing and purchasing flows from single license purchases to subscription
My Role: Design strategy, user research, wireframing, prototyping, handoff to development
Project Timeline: 3 months
Our competitor Epidemic’s pricing page, offering unlimited downloads.
Our former pricing page, which only offered single license purchasing.
The problem
After its acquisition by Shutterstock in 2015, PremiumBeat was KTLO for the next couple years. A music licensing platform, it offered royalty-free tracks primarily through transactional, per-license purchases.
When I was moved to the team in early 2024, there was a renewed investment in growing the brand, which at this point was lagging behind the competition. By Q2, we were pacing at -15% YoY in revenue.
The main problem: competitors were offering cheaper prices and unlimited music subscriptions — we were not.
Our single license pricing model
Below is a wireframe I created for the single license comparison table.
Users wanted flexibility
I conducted qualitative user interviews to better understand how customers preferred to license music. Users overwhelmingly reported a strong preference for buying tracks one at a time.
Every user I spoke to said the same thing: they wanted to buy individual licenses, when and how they needed them.
From this, I developed the hypothesis that our core customers, many of whom are project-based freelancers or agencies, wanted flexibility and transparency when purchasing music.
This insight guided our initial roadmap, which focused on quick wins and experimentation around offering new licenses that covered more or less legal protections, giving us a total of four different kinds of licenses that users can choose for their project needs.
A spreadsheet of the notes I’d been taking during user interviews, which enabled me cross-reference more quickly and make connections
Business pushes for subscriptions
While research validated our existing pricing model of allowing users to buy one track at a time, the PremiumBeat Head of Growth messaged me one morning: we needed to launch an unlimited subscription model as soon as possible.
This pivot was driven by executive pressure and a desire to follow the competition’s lead and grow our revenue, which was in a decline.
With my PM out of office, I stepped in to manage both design execution and cross-functional alignment.
We had to ship something that looked like the competition, but better and at lightning speed.
Pricing page iterations
Contextual purchasing
An important purchasing flow for our users is being able to license a track while browsing within our music library. They are able to click a license button in the track row and download the track that way. I had to redesign this experience so that instead of buying just the track, a user is prompted to purchase a subscription in order to download.
Outcomes
While this change was rolled out fully, and not A/B tested, we did see a story coming through in the data post-launch.
While our order rate did go up significantly, our bookings also went down due to the fact that the subscription was priced drastically lower than our single licenses. In addition, majority of revenue is coming from returning customers; who we’ve already known are mostly interested in single license purchases, from user research.
Originally, we had launched subscriptions and almost completely hidden the ability for users to purchase single licenses. But after monitoring the data, it was decided that it would be better to more carefully balance the needs of the customer with the needs of the business, and we added back the ability for users to buy one track at a time.
A mockup of a more balanced approach to push subscriptions but still offer the ability for user’s to buy single licenses.