UX case study: + email capture redesign for an indie music label

The approach

Cassette Futurism came to me with a landing page for an unreleased single that had been generated with AI. The page worked, technically, but it read like every other launch: a title, a date, a box asking for an email. Nothing about it made a fan feel like they were early to something. The label's goal was narrower than "more signups" — they wanted existing fans, the people already following the band, to convert into pre-registered early listeners. What I delivered is two screens. Screen 1 is the cover, setting the visual tone for the release. Screen 2 carries the hero and the email capture together, so the moment a fan understands what the single is, the way to get in early is directly in front of them rather than further down the page. The behaviour I'm designing for is straightforward: a fan lands, feels the release is a specific event rather than generic marketing copy, and hands over an email before leaving. The capture is positioned to be the natural next action, not an afterthought at the bottom of a scroll. I should be honest about the limits of this write-up. There is no Figma file and no prototype behind these screens, only the two images. And I did not document my reasoning for the four skills this brief targeted — anticipation, belonging, scarcity, and variable reward through tribe all went unexplained, so I can't claim design decisions here that I never recorded.

The screens

The brief

Cassette Futurism — Indie Music Label · Hero section + email capture for an unreleased single from a rising indie band

The label generated a landing page with AI but it feels generic — fans don't feel the anticipation, the page reads like every other launch.

Objective: Design a hero + capture flow that builds genuine anticipation and converts existing fans into pre-registered early listeners.

What the client already had

The first version their own LLM produced — the thing this redesign had to beat.

The behaviour design behind it

Anticipation

Cassette Futurism came to me with a landing page for an unreleased single that had been generated with AI. The page worked, technically, but it read like every other launch: a title, a date, a box asking for an email. Nothing about it made a fan feel like they were early to something. The label's goal was narrower than "more signups" — they wanted existing fans, the people already following the band, to convert into pre-registered early listeners.

Belonging

Cassette Futurism came to me with a landing page for an unreleased single that had been generated with AI. The page worked, technically, but it read like every other launch: a title, a date, a box asking for an email. Nothing about it made a fan feel like they were early to something. The label's goal was narrower than "more signups" — they wanted existing fans, the people already following the band, to convert into pre-registered early listeners.

Scarcity

Cassette Futurism came to me with a landing page for an unreleased single that had been generated with AI. The page worked, technically, but it read like every other launch: a title, a date, a box asking for an email. Nothing about it made a fan feel like they were early to something. The label's goal was narrower than "more signups" — they wanted existing fans, the people already following the band, to convert into pre-registered early listeners.

Variable Reward — Tribe

Cassette Futurism came to me with a landing page for an unreleased single that had been generated with AI. The page worked, technically, but it read like every other launch: a title, a date, a box asking for an email. Nothing about it made a fan feel like they were early to something. The label's goal was narrower than "more signups" — they wanted existing fans, the people already following the band, to convert into pre-registered early listeners.