SKIO Music
Creator Platform
Grew from product designer to strategic product lead – defining the vision for a vertically integrated platform that replaced manual music contracts with automated legal tools, built a global content marketplace, and grew a creator community of 650,000+ users.
The Final Result
Frictionless experience that would drive user adoption and measurable financial growth.
The Challenge
The music industry ran on fragmented, inaccessible systems. Contracts took weeks and required expensive attorneys. Content owners had no scalable way to licence catalogues. There was no unified environment where creativity, commerce, and community could co-exist — so every creator was exposed and every collaboration was a legal risk.
- Contract turnaround measured in weeks, not minutes
- Copyright takedown risk on every remix or derivative work
- Labels had no scalable tool for community UGC licensing
- No pathway for independent talent to reach industry recognition
My Role
Joined as Product Designer in 2015 and grew into Product Lead over 4.5 years. I defined the vision, built the design system, led cross-functional teams spanning musicians, developers, producers, and entertainment attorneys, and drove every major product decision from concept through to global scale.
- Platform vision & product strategy
- Ethnographic field research
- Design system architecture (Figma)
- Automated legal split sheet design
- Content marketplace & licensing UX
- Contest & gamification systems
A vertically integrated platform
SKIO wasn’t designed as a collection of features. It was conceived as an ecosystem — a single environment where every participant in the music value chain could operate. The diagram below, developed as part of the product strategy work, shows how all platform nodes interconnect across creation, ownership, legal, commerce, and community.
How the platform created value
Each pillar served a distinct audience but shared the same legal, financial, and social infrastructure – meaning every new feature compounded the value of every existing one.
Talent Marketplace
The career engine for independent producers and artists. Legal access to song stems from major labels, A&R visibility, and a professional EPK - all in one dashboard. Creators could find collaborators, negotiate custom contract terms via simple sliders, and build a verifiable portfolio without needing label representation.
Content Marketplace
Built for labels, managers, and rights holders who needed to scale their catalogue's reach without manual licensing overhead. Content owners could upload masters and stems, set remix terms, and issue thousands of micro-licences instantly through an automated legal interface. Sound packs and plugins extended the marketplace into production tools, creating an additional revenue stream.
Remix & Original Contests
The platform's primary growth and engagement engine. Contests transformed passive users into active creators - and gave content owners a powerful tool to activate fanbases at scale. Artists like The Chainsmokers and Clean Bandit ran campaigns that generated millions of impressions and thousands of high-quality remixes.
Typography & Color Scheme
The visual language of the platform was designed to work throughout the producer’s journey – dark theme when a user is browsing, light theme to represent the physical contract.
What we built, what it proved
SKIO was still scaling when I transitioned out in 2019. The platform demonstrated that creator-first legal infrastructure was commercially viable and globally scalable — validated by Grammy-winning producers, major label participation, and a community growing across dozens of countries.
- 650,000+ registered users across the global creator community
- $750,000+ in prizes distributed to creators worldwide
- 10M+ global impressions generated through contest campaigns
- Automated split sheets reduced contract turnaround from weeks to under 10 minutes
- Majority of platform collaborations used SKIO’s built-in legal tools within the first year
- Content marketplace enabled labels to issue thousands of micro-licences instantly
- Design system unified 14+ platform entities – profiles, wallets, contracts, social features – into one scalable framework
Want to see how it was built?
The process page covers the ethnographic research, all three pillars designed in depth, the automated legal system, and the design system architecture – across 4.5 years of work.
