Songkick’s First Hack Day of 2018
JFDI (just effing do it) is something of a company value over here at Songkick. To live up to this value we dedicate a couple of days a year to hack days, where we break down the barriers of product planning and development sprints to just create! Everyone across the company pitches in and scratches that creative itch of theirs. The end result is a melting pot of ideas, worked on by a mixture of groups and people. Last week we held our first hack day of 2018. Here’s what we built.
Jiv: Staff Picks
Songkick is built for fans, by fans. What Jiv endeavoured to do was add a flavour of that to our event pages, designing a way for staff at Songkick to highlight their recommendations to users. Did anyone make it to the Alva Noto show on Sunday?
Ben and Joe: Stats on user profile pages
We know how important it is to prove that you went to the most gigs out of your friends last year and that you saw your favourite band before any of them. Ben and Joe came up with the concept of statistics tiles for Songkick user profiles, giving you the ability to boast amongst your social circles.
Alex: Your gigography as a festival poster
Alex shows up to more festivals than any other person, period. No surprise then that he wanted to create a personalised festival poster of the bands he’d been to see.
This hack day I tried my hand at seeing if we could generate a kind of festival poster for users that would show them the artists that they’ve gone to see live (originally I wanted to let the users to filter by ‘this year’, ‘last-year’ and ‘all-time’ but had to drastically scale down what I could actually do in 6 hours).
Turns out design is hard, as well as naming things.
Paula, Elliot, Ikhsan, Lauren: Songkick values on songkick.com
There’ve been a number of changes over the past 12 months at Songkick and to help us along the way we came together to agree upon our values as a team. We’re proud of the work we’re doing here and wanted to share our vision with the world. That’s why Paula, Elliot, Ikhsan, and Lauren took a minute to post them on Songkick.com!
https://www.songkick.com/info/values
Ikhsan, Elliot: Day of Event Live Feed
What if you received notifications about useful stuff about the gig you are about to attend? Ikhsan and Elliot explored an idea of a page where you can see the set times for the gig, read messages from the artists, listen to their songs, find directions to venue. Lots of possibilities for new cool stuff! What is the most useful pre-gig information for you?
Adila, Paul, Eric, Meredith, Aaron: Superlatives
With over 1 billion artist-to-fan relationships, there’s a lot of data on Songkick! Adila, Paul, Eric, Meredith, and Aaron wanted to use that data to flaunt the most active, avid and unique fans in the Songkick ecosystem.
Alexey: Crowdsourced set times
On the night of a show, knowing whether there is time to grab dinner between leaving the office and the band coming on stage would be a game changer. I took a stab at solving this problem by using Google’s Vision API to convert a picture of the set times at a venue into text.
Karim: Songkick Flashbacks
Songkick Flashbacks is a concept where fans can share their experience of a concert after the show, and acts as a means to revisit and relive the experience in the future.
The videos pull in content from our users across the social media spectrum including Songkick, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Spotify and mash this together with a phrase specified by the user that sums up their overall experience.
The videos are then stitched together with music from the artist (something on their set list from the concert) and are then available to share anywhere.
The concept here used real footage from the recent Four Tet concert at Village Underground attended by ex-Songkicker Jamie Hughes.
Mark: Content on screens around the office
Like many offices, we have screens up on our walls. These screens have been displaying our teams metrics and goals, but if we’re to tell the truth they’re not the most compelling. Mark took time out to change that, coming up with a Google Chrome extension where we can submit URLs to then be displayed around the office! We now not only have our metrics, but our blog, Songkick.com and the homepage of our friends over at Topsify’s website!
This hack streams independent browser windows, cycling through a regularly updated list of URLs, to each office TV (using Google Chromecasts). By making it easier to get content up on the office TVs, I’m hoping we’ll start seeing more interesting things up there, helping guide, inspire, challenge, and amuse us all.
Now, you’ll notice none of these features are showing on Songkick. Well, Rome wasn’t built in a day and as you can imagine, there’s still a lot of work to be done before we can consider making these features available to the masses who use Songkick each and every day.
However, we hope that this paints a picture of how we think about getting work done at Songkick, and thanks to this sketch book of ideas from our team, we will strive to continue developing meaningful products built for fans, by fans.
