Unify for Spotify

Inspiration

I listen to music constantly. I love connecting with people through music, and I think this would facilitate that.

What it does

Given two Spotify user accounts, the software will scrub through their music libraries and listening history to produce a list of artists/albums/etc that both the users are interested in.

How we built it

We built it with the Python implementation of the Spotify Web API. Simply, it catalogues all albums, songs, and artists in two users libraries and creates a collection of interests for each user. We then compare these collections against each other and find their intersection.

Challenges we ran into

I typically program within the the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) terminal. However, WSL isn't perfect, and it has an issue when trying to access web-data with Python. After trying to troubleshoot this for a couple hours, I opted to just download VS Code and complete the program with that.

Further, this was my first time using the Spotify API. It deals a lot with JSON files, and that's something I don't have a lot of experience with. However, I was able to overcome these challenges with blood, sweat, and many tears.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

My whole team dropped today. So I ended up doing this solo. My project isn't as polished as I would've liked it to be, but I'm proud that I was able to complete an entire project by myself.

What we learned

I've gotta vet my teammates better next time.

What's next for Unify for Spotify

In an ideal world, I'd like to smooth out some of the wrinkles I have with the software. The demo only shows the interesection of the two users followed artists, but there is actually much more functionality programmed. However, with the time constraints I was unable to refine the implementation that connects the two accounts' taste in a much broader fashion.

Also, I would like to set it up on a website, so that people anywhere can use the software to find people that they have similar tastes to.