I am at Outside Hacks this weekend – A hackathon associated with the Outside Lands music festival. For this hack I thought it would be fun to try out the brand new Your Music Library endpoints in the Spotify Web API. These endpoints let you inspect and manipulate the tracks that a user has saved to their music. Since the hackathon is all about building apps for a music festival, it seems natural to create a web app that gives you festival artist recommendations based upon your Spotify saved tracks. The result is the Outside Lands Recommender:
The Recommender works by pulling in all the saved tracks from your Spotify ‘Your Music’ collection, aggregating the artists and then using the Echo Nest Artist Similar API to find festival artists that match or are similar to those artists. The Spotify API is then used to retrieve artist images and audio samples for the recommendations where they are presented in all of their bootstrap glory.
This was a pretty straight forward app, which was good since I only had about half the normal hacking time for a weekend hackathon. I spent the other half of the time building a festival dataset for hackers to use (as well as answering lots of questions about both the Spotify and Echo Nest APIs).
It has been a very fun hackathon. It is extremely well organized, the Weebly location is fantastic, and the quality of hackers is very high. I’ve already seen some fantastic looking hacks and we are still a few hours from demo time. Plus, this happened.
Two more victims
Music Machinery 