Product case study · Michael Kopp
Meet Guthrie
Created for music collectors and their friends
Guthrie is a music player like Spotify, but it's connected to one music lover's personal library.
Unique Guthrie features let friends recommend gems in the collection to each other, build folders of themed playlists, easily reorganize their queue, and much more.
The UI is clean and simple, with detailed views and power-user tools tucked away until they're needed.
What Guthrie Is
One person hosts their collection on Navidrome, a free music server, and invites friends to explore the whole library. Guthrie helps the library owner uncover forgotten treasures, and their friends can discover and recommend new favorites.
The roadmap for Guthrie is loaded with new features not found in other music players. It's a desktop app, coming to Linux first, with Windows and Mac to follow.
My Contributions
I run the product side of a two-person team: the vision and roadmap, the design system, every screen and interaction, and the specs my partner builds the app from. I also code the app's UI myself and wire it to the backend, working with an AI coding agent.
My partner, a software architect, owns the architecture and the Rust backend. This prototype was built with Claude Design and draws from my own collection of more than 5,000 albums.
Three Highlights from the Prototype
Recommendations For Friends
Recommend an album, track, or playlist to a friend, with a note about why they'll love it. Guthrie lets them know when new recommendations arrive and keeps track of the ones they haven't played yet.
Where to find itSidebar › Recommendations › Your Recommendations for Others, then open June Park
Playlist Folders
Serious listeners build a lot of playlists. Folders let you organize them however you like: by mood, style, era, or by themes like Songs About Trains. Find them easily on the Playlists page.
Where to find itSidebar › Playlists, then scroll to Your Folders
A Queue That Makes Sense
Many players flatten everything you queue into one long list of songs. In Guthrie, an album stays an album: one card you can drag as a whole, open to reorder its tracks, and remove the songs you want to skip. Tracks and playlists get their own cards, so you can see what you lined up at a glance.
Where to find itSidebar › Queue, or the queue button at bottom right
See It for Yourself
Queue up an album, recommend it to a friend, try the views for albums and artists, and enjoy the little moments of delight.
Open the Prototype Opens in a new tab · Best on a laptop or desktop screenWhat's Next for Guthrie
What you'll click through is the design prototype. The native app is in development now: the MVP is targeted for Q1 2027, and a release candidate with recommendations, playlist folders, and other unique Guthrie features follows in Q2 2027.