mywaves.xyz

The music super app for businesses

Comment 3

Join the discord here: https://discord.gg/Rj7bPKmV or email at [email protected] if you're interested!

Inspiration

Too often when I walk into stores or restaurants they're all playing the same music. I think it would be cool if the community that goes to a store/restaurant had more input and control over what songs play at the store. I also think it would be cool if this didn't require too much effort form the community. If they can just walk into a store and it automatically plays their favorite songs that makes ordinary tasks such as shopping for groceries or exciting new events such as going to a new bar 10x more fun.

NOTE

I created mywaves a couple of months ago as a simple music requesting app (seen here: https://devpost.com/software/mywaves-xyz). Throughout the Foursquare hackathon I've added a number of features to transform mywaves into The Music Super App for Businesses. Those 4 features are shown below:

What it does

  1. Music analytics - shows how many customers checkin through Swarm/Foursquare within 3 minutes of each song playing. That way business owners can see which songs generate the most engagement. It also shows how much money is spent within 3 minutes of each song playing. That way business owners can see which songs generate the most revenue. Business owners can look at this engagement and revenue wholistically to make better decisions about what music to play that their community enjoys listening to!
  2. Automatic song requesting - now customers can create mywaves accounts! Once they create one they can connect to their Spotify account and to their Swarm/Foursquare account. Then, whenever they checkin to a location that's using mywaves, a few of their favorite songs are automatically requested. This was customers can essentially automatically start hearing their favorite songs wherever they are!
  3. The Music Map - customers can search the area around them and see which songs are currently playing at every location using mywaves. This provides a much more immersive experience than simply seeing pictures and reviews about a location because the music gives good insight into the atmosphere of the restaurant/store. In the future I'll also retrieve data from the Foursquare API about if there's certain musical events going on at different locations and I'll display that in The Music Map. I'll use other 3rd party APIs such as SeatGeek to show concerts and TouchTunes to show music currently playing on digital jukeboxes.
  4. The Music Map API - third party developers can query locations by their Foursquare ID to see what song is currently playing at that location! For example, Foursquare could implement this into their City Guide so their users can see what songs are playing when they're looking for somewhere to go. Similarly, Apple Maps and Google Maps could do the same thing. It could also be integrated into Swarm so that users know what song was playing when they checked into each location!

How we built it

  • Ruby on Rails
  • Heroku
  • Postgresql
  • Foursquare API
  • Square API
  • Spotify API
  • Soundtrack Your Brand API

Challenges we ran into

See "What we learned"

  • Also note that if you try to sign up for an account and connect your Spotify account right now, it won't work because I have to manually add the email associated with your Spotify account to a list on my developer dashboard on the Spotify API website. I requested an "API usage extension" from Spotify so that I don't have to manually add every Spotify email, but I still haven't gotten approved yet. If you'd like to try this app out with your Spotify feel free to reach out to me on Discord or by email and I'll add your Spotify email. Thanks! (Note that the Soundtrack Your Brand integration works without any manual intervention, you can sign up for a free trial here: https://www.soundtrackyourbrand.com/)

Accomplishments that we're proud of

That it all works! I'm proud that it has a lot of opportunity to be create happier experiences for everyone. For people going shopping at stores or eating at restaurants or bars it's a fun thing to be able to automatically hear your favorite music as you walk in the door. It's also fun to be able to see what music is playing everywhere with "The Music Map" and provides a feature that the mainstream maps/reviews apps don't traditionally offer. From the business owner's point of view, being able to see what songs people like and don't like means they can focus more on their business and giving their customers the best products/experiences and less on worrying that the music their playing isn't vibing with their customers. I'm also proud that it's a website that'll be able to sustain itself through a viable business plan. 1) I can offer businesses some features free such as Automatic Music Requesting and then I can offer a small subscription fee for other features such as Music Analytics 2) I can allow businesses to advertise on "The Music Map" to either a) show what music they're playing and encourage customers to go there or b) if they're having an event they can advertise tickets 3) Developers can use "The Music Map API" and I can offer a free tier and then a paid tier similar to how the Foursquare API works.

What we learned

  • How to use the Foursquare API!
  • How to use Turbo Streams in Rails to automatically update the UI without having to refresh the screen (I used this in "The Music Map" & in the "Analytics" sections)
  • How to create an API for 3rd party developers ("The Music Map API")

What's next for mywaves.xyz

  • Integrating with Foursquare's Pilgrim SDK! This way customers won't have to manually check into a location with Swarm and then their favorite songs get automatically requested, instead simply as soon as they walk into the store their favorite songs will be requested by using phone GPS, etc.
  • Expanding The Music Map to use the Unfolded SDK so that it's more of a "map" and less of a "list". I think some pretty cool musical visualizations could be made with this! I also want to show more historical music data so instead of just showing what's currently playing it'll show what has played in the past. I want to show the "volume" of the music as well how loud/quiet the music is because I know that's something useful to me as a customer sometimes I'm in the mood for quiet music at a cafe other times I'm in the mood for some up-tempo loud music at a restaurant.
  • Formalizing The Music Map API to use access tokens, etc
  • Integrating Foursquare's events, Eventbrite API, SeatGeek API, TouchTunes API so that The Music Map API covers more stores
  • I'm also going to expand the Analytics section to not only show Analytics for individual songs, but also show for Albums, Artists, Genres, as well as other categories such as how "Danceable", "Happy", "Fast/Slow" the community likes the songs to be!
  • I want to add more integrations so that if businesses don't use Spotify or Soundtrack Your Brand they can still use these features. I'm planning on doing it through the Shazam API so restaurants can just leave the app open in the background and it'll periodically "shazam" what song is playing to keep track of the analytics and display what song is playing in "The Music Map" and "The Music Map API"
  • Reaching out to more customers to get this in more and more businesses!
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Updates

posted an update —

The audio in the link to the "clipchamp" video I originally posted isn't matched with the video at the beginning. I lined them up correctly, and made four versions of the video at different speeds:

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