Inspiration
As a musician new to the music industry, our teammate Zeke discovered that there were no good options for sharing his music with the world. Services such as Bandcamp and SoundCloud are flooded with millions of tracks from old and new artists, which makes it difficult for listeners to find something they like. Furthermore, it is almost impossible for new and unknown music to be heard on Pandora and Spotify. This leaves a large section of the music industry alienated: many new musicians want the chance to be heard, and many listeners want the chance to hear them. That's where IndieFind comes in.
What it does
There is no searching for music on IndieFind. All the user has to do is Just Push Play. IndieFind will choose a random song for the user, which the user can rate with the upvote and downvote buttons to teach preferences to our algorithm. Our algorithm will prioritize new, undiscovered songs over music that users have heard a lot to keep the user experience fresh.
How we built it
We used a mysql database with a spring boot web app using the thymeleaf templating engine to create our IndieFind web app. To host it, we used a web server on AWS. Teammates Michael and Wyatt were in charge of designing the front end, Miles developed the database, Josh coded the back end, and Zeke created music and provided consulting.
Challenges we faced
Spring boot was particularly difficult for our team to figure out, as it was our first time utilizing it. Source control was very challenging as well, though we were pleased with the benefits of GitHub once we figured it out. Our group found it difficult to focus attention on one particular part of development at a time. We were distracted with how much we had to get done in a short amount of time that finishing things became difficult.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We are particularly proud of our algorithm. We spent a fair amount of time fine tuning it, but we are very pleased with the results. We are pleased with how our music player can play song after song without forcing the user to push the Refresh button after each song. We are also proud of Zeke's original music in the app that he created over the course of the weekend, which provides a personal touch to our web app.
What we learned
Our experience this weekend would not have been nearly as fun with a different team. Our team worked well together and kept the experience fun. We also learned that it is important to sleep and take breaks when working on a big project like this to keep our minds fresh.
What's next for IndieFind
We would like to further develop the web app and mobile app functionality for IndieFind. We would also like to add the ability to save artists so that you can find them on other services or connect with them via social media. If we were to launch IndieFind, we would plan to put ads on the service for ad revenue, with a premium subscription option to let users pay to not hear the ads.
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