Here’s how an artist page used to look like in the Google Play Store app:

And this is its new look:

In addition to displaying the section that launches Music Explorer, we also scaled down the appearance of cells in the Similar Artists section in the left column. Why?

Take a look at the first image. We display up to four similar artists (if we have that info), and using full-bleed artist images with overlayed names creates this gigantic block that completely overpowers the main artist image. It’s just too heavy, and it constantly draws your attention away from the rest of the content on this page. The second image shows how we tweaked the visuals of that section to be more scaled down. The artist image takes half the cell, and the artist name is displayed to its right. And now we can also fit more of these cells above the fold.

This highlights how the visual styling of a content block follows its logical importance in the overall hierarchy of the screen content. Here’s the same principle applied to the album page. First, this is how the album page used to look like:

And this is how it looks like now:

Once again here, we are breaking this big heavy block into smaller pieces. As we’re displaying the artist image side by side with the artist name, we switched from 3 columns to 2. This provides enough space for reasonably short artist names, and we wrap them if necessary to multi-line mode.