Competitive intelligence dashboard
Automated scraping and AI-powered analysis for music licensing market tracking at Musicbed.
Overview
Musicbed needed a better way to track what competitors were doing — pricing changes, catalog movements, licensing term updates — without spending hours on manual research each week. I led the design and front-end implementation of an internal dashboard that automated the collection and synthesis of this data.
The problem
The licensing team was doing competitive analysis manually: periodic Google searches, spreadsheet tracking, and word-of-mouth from customers. This was slow, inconsistent, and easy to deprioritize when other work came up. Important signals were getting missed.
What we built
The dashboard pulls data from multiple sources on a scheduled basis, runs it through a structured analysis pipeline, and surfaces changes in a format optimized for quick scanning. The interface is deliberately simple — a feed of changes, filterable by competitor and category, with the ability to drill into historical trends.
Key features:
- Automated scraping of competitor sites and licensing pages
- AI-powered diff and summarization of detected changes
- Trend charts for pricing and catalog size over time
- Email digest for weekly summaries
Design decisions
The most important design decision was resisting the urge to show everything. Competitive intelligence data is inherently noisy. The interface needed strong defaults — show me what changed, not everything we know. Filters and history are available but not foregrounded.
The visual design borrowed from internal tools conventions: dense, scannable, optimized for power users rather than occasional visitors.