STELLOS

• 

  Pitch!

Inspiration

Artists create enormous cultural value but often struggle to earn early, keep control, and monetize fairly. Public stories around ownership battles and delayed financial stability for artists reinforced the same core problem: the current system is expensive, slow, and hard to navigate without industry leverage. STELLOS is our attempt to make artist monetization direct, transparent, and accessible from day one.

What it does

STELLOS is a music discovery and licensing platform where artists can upload tracks, enable licensing, and earn from usage. Fans can discover songs in an interactive map, support tracks through token-based voting, and help surface rising music. The platform combines discovery, licensing, and support mechanics in one workflow.

How we built it

We built a FastAPI backend and Next.js frontend, with Supabase for database and storage. Uploaded tracks are processed into audio embeddings using a Hugging Face CLAP model to power similarity-based discovery. We integrated Stripe for payment flow (with demo fallback) and XRPL logging hooks for on-chain license proofing. Development was accelerated using parallel coding agents and finalized with Codex-driven debugging and integration cleanup.

Challenges we ran into

The biggest challenge was environment and dependency reliability across backend, frontend, Supabase, model tooling, and XRPL/Stripe integrations. Version conflicts and local networking issues consumed significant time. We also had to harden fallback behavior so the product remains usable when optional services are unavailable.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We shipped a working end-to-end prototype as a solo build: upload, discovery, licensing, token voting, and dashboard-ready backend flows. We're especially proud of the embedding-driven discovery layer and the fact that the system is already structured for production hardening.

What we learned

Strong setup discipline is a force multiplier. Clear environment configuration, dependency boundaries, and graceful fallbacks matter as much as features. We also learned that shipping integrated systems requires ruthless prioritization and fast debugging loops.

What's next for STELLOS

Next, we're improving ranking quality, expanding licensing templates and checkout UX, and tightening reliability for production deployment. We're also refining XRPL-backed license proofs, onboarding early creators, and preparing STELLOS for pilot launch with real artist communities.

Built With

• docker
• fastapi
• ffmpeg
• huggingface
• librosa
• next.js
• npm
• python
• pytorch
• react
• stripe
• supabase
• typescript