Kindred
Fans put real money behind the artists they believe in.
An app for rising African artists and the fans who support them. Listeners pay one monthly fee, split across up to five artists they follow. Those fans unlock exclusives from the artists they fund. Artists use a website to release music and run the business.
Open the live web app- Origin
- Studio product
- Platforms
- iOS, Android, Web
- What people open
- Fan app, Artist Studio, public pages
- Role
- Product, design, engineering
- On this project
- Expo · Next.js · Convex · RevenueCat
The problem
A following on streaming is not a living.
An artist can grow an audience of thousands and still take home almost nothing. The fans who care most have no clean way to back one person month after month. The artist has no idea who those people are.
Kindred makes that support the product. Not a tip button bolted onto a player. The subscription is the relationship, and each listener chooses which artists get their share.
On the phone
What we built
Listening on the phone. The business on the web.
- 01
A fan app with discovery, search, library, playlists, a real queue, background audio, and a now-playing screen built to a high craft bar.
- 02
Supporter plans at $4.99 or $9.99 a month, split equally across up to five followed artists. The supporter can change that set any time.
- 03
Exclusives that open only for people funding that artist. Paying is not enough on its own. The server refuses the file to everyone else.
- 04
Artist Studio on the web: upload audio and artwork, schedule releases, post updates, see supporters, draft thank-yous, and read demo earnings labelled as not real payouts.
- 05
Offline listening for supporters. Follows and reactions tapped with no signal are sent once when the phone reconnects.
- 06
Public artist, track, and mix pages that play public audio on the web and send people into the app for everything else.
The hard parts
Where the craft actually went.
A player that grows, never jumps
The bar at the bottom of the screen expands into the full player as one continuous movement. You can catch it halfway and drag it back down.
Drag the sound wave to seek
The wave under each track is drawn from measurements taken once when the artist uploads. The phone never has to decode the whole song just to draw a picture of it.
Who has paid is decided on the server
Supporter status comes from the app store's own record, never guessed inside the app. Delete the app, reinstall, tap restore, and access comes back.
Works with no signal
Downloads play in airplane mode. Anything tapped while offline is sent once when signal returns. A follow that syncs twice still produces one follow.
Visuals that respect the battery
An animated visual on the player, with a switch to turn it off. It stays off by default when the phone reports low battery mode.
A live listener count
Each artist page shows roughly how many people are listening right now. The number fades within a minute of them stopping. A count only, never a list of names.
Why it matters
When the app is the business, this is the shape.
Kindred is a phone product for fans and a website for the artist, on one backend: payments, media, accounts, and craft. It shows one studio can carry all of that.
Next project
Everyone who touches a building works from the same record.