Music discovery, run by people who actually listen.
A streaming companion that replaces behavioural recommendation with human curation, built on the Discogs API, programmed by musicians and producers, not your watch history.
Problem
Competitors' "Discover" isn't discovery. It's an average of what's already popular, reverse-engineered from your Instagram activity and YouTube history. The result is a playlist that reflects your data exhaust, not your taste, and never rarity.
The Mechanism
Spiller pulls from Discogs, the largest musician- and collector-maintained music database, to build playlists curated by the people who make and dig for records, not by what keeps you scrolling. Less "Listeners also played," more "a producer put this next to that on purpose.
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A UI-black and surface-grey base keeps the interface out of the way of the art. One primary, a saturated magenta, carries all emphasis: now playing, CTAs, the mark. Restraint everywhere else so the accent reads as a signal, not decoration.
Visual System
Recommendation shouldn't be a mirror of consumption. It should be a point of view. The best record stores, radio shows and club nights were never run on plays-per-minute, they were run on someone's ear.
- Space Grotesk runs the entire interface, headlines, body, labels, data, with no second typeface introduced anywhere. Hierarchy comes from weight and scale, not from managing multiple families.
- Labels & metadata Small caps, letter-spaced, set in Inter, the same treatment used on the palette tokens themselves (UI-BLACK, SURFACE-01, PRIMARY-01) carries straight through to in-app metadata: artist names, track counts, timestamps. One typographic rule, applied everywhere a label appears, rather than a separate convention per screen.
Spiller, player, spun.
The π mark isn't decorative. It's 33⅓ — the rotational speed, in RPM, a record needs to play back correctly. One repeating, never-quite-resolving number standing in for another. The mark is the product thesis: precision over approximation.
- Restraint as the brand argument Most streaming UIs lean into a busy, multicolour palette, gradients, mood-based theming, colour-as-decoration.
- Spiller does the opposite on purpose: one colour, used sparingly, makes magenta function like scarcity itself, a visual echo of the product's actual thesis, that good discovery isn't everywhere, it's deliberate.
Product Moment
Track, artist and play count, layered over the sleeve, the record stays the hero, UI recedes to a translucent scrim.
- A weekly digest reframed around listening behaviour and context (hours, distance, chart movement) rather than algorithmic "for you" framing — data presented, not data deciding.
States
Active/playing states are the only place colour appears in full saturation; everything inactive recedes to grey. The interface effectively narrates the product's point of view without a line of copy, attention is earned, not ambient.
- Spiller treats taste as something authored, not inferred. It's a small bet that the next era of music discovery looks less like a feed and more like a record shop with someone behind the counter.
