This summer was a summer of music for me. I went to various concerts, music festivals, etc. all to get the most enjoyment possible out of my last school summer vacation. During that time, however, I kept trying to find nearby events that correlated with my music tastes. A lot of websites were okay, but I came across an interesting issue: I wasn’t exactly sure what I wanted.
Of course, there are music genres that people can align themselves with. However, asides from indie music, I can sometimes be all over the place- and I’m sure others can relate. I came up with an idea to combat my complex tastes, an idea that would be tackled for my JavaScript class.
Introducing Siren. Essentially, it would work like this: a user would sign in to their Spotify account, the website would take a look at their music preferences, and then recommend nearby music events to partake in. Let’s break it down.
Prompting the user to sign in to Spotify to get information about them honestly wasn’t the worst. However, once I got the information, I realized the Spotify API didn’t really have a way to churn out the user’s top genres. As a result, I grabbed their top artists, and from there grabbed the artists’ genres. I now had a list of the user’s top genres.
The Spotify app has a section dedicated to concerts, so I assumed I’d be able to grab those easily from the API. I wrongly assumed the API’s abilities again. All the concert information was inaccessible, and so I was just stuck with a bunch of genres.
However, I suddenly got curious. I use Ticketmaster for a lot of the concerts I go to, so I looked to see if they had an API I could use. They did! From there, I set Siren up to find music events that shared genres with the user’s list. Events were also chosen based on a user-inputted radius and a location that could either be chosen from a list of cities, or the user can just choose to use their current location.
Siren is now complete, and it’s my second Spotify project. I feel like the Spotify API’s potential hasn’t been fully reached. I wonder how far I can take it…
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