CASE STUDY
Apple Music
Replay ‘24
ROLEUX Director
CLIENT
AGENCYInstrument
LAUNCHEDDecember 2024
Top 10 lists
don't tell you
why music
matters.
The brief from Apple Music was to evolve Replay into a best-in-class experience: exceptional look and feel, intuitive navigation, and meaningful enough to share. The bigger strategic question we set ourselves was harder — what role can Replay play in deepening people's relationship with music?
And how I did it.
THE PROCESS
01
Discovery & immersion
Deep immersion into how people actually talk about music — what Replay meant to existing users, where it fell short, and what the competitive landscape (Spotify Wrapped, YouTube Recap) got right and wrong. The key gap: emotional resonance. Data without meaning is just noise.
Discovery & immersion
Deep immersion into how people actually talk about music — what Replay meant to existing users, where it fell short, and what the competitive landscape (Spotify Wrapped, YouTube Recap) got right and wrong. The key gap: emotional resonance. Data without meaning is just noise.
Cultural Research · Competitive audit · Insight synthesis
02
Experience archetype development
Co-developed the three-archetype framework with a co-strategist, presented to and refined with the Creative Director. This became the strategic backbone of the entire project — a shared language for decisions from feature prioritisation to visual tone to copy direction.
Co-developed the three-archetype framework with a co-strategist, presented to and refined with the Creative Director. This became the strategic backbone of the entire project — a shared language for decisions from feature prioritisation to visual tone to copy direction.
Archetype workshops · Framework development · Internal alignment
03
Design concepting & prototyping
Working directly with two visual designers and technologists at Instrument, translated strategy into screen concepts — dashboard layouts, share formats, interaction models. Presented direction to Apple's internal music marketing team and iterated based on their deep knowledge of the product and user base.
Design concepting & prototyping
Working directly with two visual designers and technologists at Instrument, translated strategy into screen concepts — dashboard layouts, share formats, interaction models. Presented direction to Apple's internal music marketing team and iterated based on their deep knowledge of the product and user base.
Concept Sprints · Prototype reviews · Figma
EXPERIENCE STRATEGY
Three ways
people relate
to music.
Working with a co-strategist and the Creative Director, we identified that people don't have one relationship with music — they have three. Rather than designing for a single use case, we built a strategic framework of experience archetypes that gave the entire team a shared language for every design decision that followed.
The archetypes weren't personas — they were lenses. They defined what each type of user needs from Replay: what brings them back, how long they spend, and critically, what would make them share. Each archetype informed its own dashboard logic, experience principles, and visual direction.
This architecture meant Replay '24 could serve all three relationships simultaneously — the same product feeling personal to vastly different users without compromising either depth or simplicity.
STRATEGY TO PRODUCT
feel personal.
The three archetypes weren't an internal framework that stayed in the strategy deck—they became the architecture of the final product. Every major moment in Replay '24 was designed to serve one of the three relationships listeners have with music, transforming a strategic insight into a tangible product experience.
Data played an equally important role, but not as the story itself. We evaluated more than 15 potential insights and metrics, applying a simple filter: does this help users feel something true about their relationship with music? If not, it didn't make the cut.
The result was a hierarchy driven by emotional resonance rather than statistical novelty. "That's so me" consistently won over "that's a big number." The archetype framework provided the lens, the data provided the evidence, and together they shaped a product that felt deeply personal rather than merely informative.
Data played an equally important role, but not as the story itself. We evaluated more than 15 potential insights and metrics, applying a simple filter: does this help users feel something true about their relationship with music? If not, it didn't make the cut.
The result was a hierarchy driven by emotional resonance rather than statistical novelty. "That's so me" consistently won over "that's a big number." The archetype framework provided the lens, the data provided the evidence, and together they shaped a product that felt deeply personal rather than merely informative.
THE WORK
BUSINESS KPI’S & IMPACT
to business outcomes.