WAV Media
WAV Media
Scaling a curated livestreaming platform into an
open creator marketplace.
#1 in Music · #5 overall on the iOS App Store · 5K → 225K users in 6 months
WAV Media is a music and tech startup built for independent artists. Founded by parent company NAVER, one of South Korea’s top tech companies, WAV Media is a digital creative community with a shared love for music, WAV enables users to create engaging content, collaborate with others and interact through exclusive experiences. For this project, my role was to bring this creation to life, from research, wireframing, prototyping, & delivering the designs to development.
Scaling a curated livestreaming platform into an open creator marketplace.
#1 in Music · #5 overall on the iOS App Store · 5K → 225K users in 6 months
A curated model hitting its ceiling
Hand-selected content built WAV. Human curation could only review so much.
The choice was expand and risk losing the quality signal, or hold tight and lose ground to platforms with deeper catalogs.
The third plan: scale supply without degrading discovery.
20 Fans, 10 Artists
The one-person agency problem
6/10 create their own content, artwork, and marketing
75%
have a second job to support their passion
Being an independent artist means running a one-person agency. Writing, producing, filming, editing, designing, posting, the creative work was the smallest part of the job. And every monetization system was built for artists who'd already made it. YouTube required follower counts most wouldn't see for years. Spotify payouts were fractional. Artists generated content at a loss because the existing economics were designed for scale, not for getting started.
Proximity, not just music
80% have watched a replay of a livestream concert in the past 2 months
48% have engage with artists through comments & dm’s through instagram or youtube.
Passive browsing wasn't creating real connection. Live was the exception — fans talking directly to artists, artists responding in real time. Streaming gave them the music. It didn't give them the person.
The barrier isn't creativity, it's production capability
Every platform was built for artist who'd already made it, Every platform wanted a piece of the pie
Live was the only thing creating genuine engagement.
Entire market clustered around passive listening, only some focused on creator to fan engagement.
Top charts feel artificial, Discovery must feel natural and tailored to the user.
How do we build a self sustaining platform that maintains quality content & brings fans & artists closer?
Three decisions. Both sides had to move at once.
Establish Quality While Scaling Supply
Anchor in editorial content while opening the platform to new creators. Giving fans something worth watching while the artist base grew.
Lower the production barrier for artists
Build tools that let artists create without production expertise. More creators showing up meant more for fans to discover.
Enable monetization from day one
Remove the economic threshold that causes creators to abandon early and give fans a direct way to participate, not just stream.
Solving The Cold Start Problem
A three-tier hybrid: editorial hero, intent-driven categories, and interleaved UGC + partner content ranked on a 48-hour trending score.
Interleave UGC with partner content. The safe move was to segregate. Segregating teaches users one row is real and one is lesser. Blending forces every piece to earn its position.
Providing Tools to Create
A sound-reactive creation tool. Upload audio, pick a palette, export in minutes. Watermarked exports built a growth loop back to the platform.
Trade creative ceiling for quality floor. A standardized template captured the 63% of artists without their own video content — the right segment. A quality-floor tool is the right call when you're building cultural legitimacy from zero.
Getting Artists Paid
Fans felt like they were supporting. Artists earned from their first livestream. Free stickers at signup. 80/20 creator-favorable split.
The split was a signal, not just economics. Better than YouTube and Spotify. The dashboard turned the statement into a number artists watched updating in real time.
Recreating The Concert Experience on TV
AirPlay had a hard limit: the phone couldn't function as a remote. Without an input path back to the stream, sending stickers or comments while casting wasn't possible. But other fans' interactions were still useful as a social layer on the TV, so we let users toggle that overlay on or off, and inherited whatever state they had on iOS.
When Kanye chose WAV to debut Ye.
On June 1, 2018, Kanye West livestreamed his Ye debut exclusively on WAV. The platform hit #1 in Music and #5 overall on the iOS App Store. Stationhead, the other app slated to host, crashed at midnight. WAV stayed up — and the ranking held for 4 consecutive weeks through Kid Cudi and Chris Lake release events.
#5
Overall on the iOS App Store — reached without paid acquisition during launch week.
5K → 225K
Users in 6 months. Growth came in waves tied to artist drops and word of mouth.
63%
Of artists had at least one visualizer uploaded.
Notable moments
- Jun 1, 2018 · Business Insider Kanye West Chose a Relatively Unknown App to Livestream His New Album Release — and it Skyrocketed to the Top of the App Store
- Jun 7, 2018 · Business Insider Kanye West & Kid Cudi's 'Kids See Ghost' Listening Event Will Be Live Streamed on the WAV App
- Aug 15, 2018 · Business Insider Magnified: Helping Artists Shape the Future of Dance Music
- Dec 10, 2018 · EDM Identity Insomniac Announces Content Partnership with WAV Media
- Feb 22, 2018 · Billboard Music Discovery Platform WAV Partners with Chris Lake's Black Book Records
- Jan 25, 2018 · Mixmag Mixmag Announces Partnership with Music and Artist Platform WAV
Reflections
Reducing creation friction beats improving distribution
Creators don't post if production cost is too high.
Distribution is moot until creation is easy.
Early-stage marketplaces need scaffolding before they self-sustain
Quality needs anchors. Communities need norms. Algorithms need signal. None emerge on their own — you have to seed them.
Scope creep on visualizer
The custom visualizer has to be scoped back and templated. The original was more technically complex than scoped. A simpler first version would have shipped on time and still solved the core problem. We ran into many roadblocks that slowed down our delivery schedule. It ended up costing our launch to be late by 3 months.
Long-term retention still depended on the spikes
We grew the trough between events — partner editorial, in-house lifestyle content. But the rhythm of the platform was still set by tentpole moments, not everyday content. Solving the in-between is the open work I'd come back to.