MELODY: Meet People through the Music You Love

Atishay Jain
Aug 26, 2017 · 5 min read

Finding new people to interact with and forming new associations and friendships is one of the most primal human needs. This is the reason we have so many social media networks available to us today. However, there is another major connecting factor with a huge potential that remains untapped — Music!

We brainstormed to find optimal ways to implement social media interaction and to integrate music preferences in finding people with possibly complementing personalities.

The Goal: To create an application that provides a platform for people to discover new people and turn those acquaintances into new friendships or relations that might last. The app that we created is called “MELODY”.

The Approach: The application that we propose to create will have the following features:

1. Buttons to connect to Facebook, Instagram, Twitter — Gather a user’s data from various social media platforms. Option to link the app to services such as Spotify, Saavn, Jio Music etc — Integrate user’s playlists, song player histories, music ratings and other preferences.

2. Allow interaction with selected matches through chat interface.

3. Provide for a karaoke game competition between people listening to similar music by comparing their playlists in real time.

4. Make recommendations for concerts and other music shows that are happening near them and allow people who love those shows to plan together and go to the concerts.

The Research: We sent out a survey to gauge what people would want from an application that suggests new people to connect with based on similarities in the kind of music they listen to. The survey questions and the inferences and conclusions from them were as follows:

  1. The source of music a user used: We used this information to see what all platforms can be used to extract data about the users’ listening habits.

2. Do the users go to concerts: The question tells how much of a social interaction do people have when considering music related activities.

3. Why would you want to meet new people with similar musical interests? We got responses varying from Dating and Making friends to getting concert buddies! This means that people are definitely interested and highly likely to be forming associations over music-related experiences.

4. Do your friends have the same taste in music as you? This helps understand the value music holds in facilitating formation of bonds between people.

5. Have you had any friendship that developed due to similar listening habits being a common ground? This helped us understand if the product that we are proposing would actually be helpful to our users in real world usage scenarios.

6. How do you look for new music? We obtained responses such as Youtube, through friends, billboards and other places on the internet. Due to the diverse results, no concrete data-visualisation was feasible.

Unique Features:

1. The friend suggestions will allow people to interact, connect and even explore new songs by talking to others with similar tastes.

2. Users can start a karaoke contest from within the app for trending songs in real time.

3. The app will recommend concerts (of their liking) taking place nearby to users who can then find people with similar choices to join that concert.

4. Other features such as chat and the possibilty of musicians jamming together is also an added advantage.

The Algorithm: We use the following integrations to fetch data about user preferences:

· Facebook, Instagram, Twitter integration to get information about the user’s existing connections.

· Integrate playlists and song histories from Spotify, Saavn, Gaana, Jio Music and other streaming apps to record what kind of music a person listens to.

· We use the hashtags commonly used by a user on social media to associate them with the artists and the bands that they love.

· Use Machine Learning algorithms to analyse all this data and link people with similar preferences to each other.

· The outputs from the same algorithm will be used to inform people about concerts of their interest taking place nearby.

The final prototype: Here are the screenshots of the final prototype that we prepared:

Choose a genre
Home screen, receive recommendations directly
Swipe right to see next recommendation
Chat Page(left) | Karaoke Page (right)
The Concerts Page
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