The Anywhere Jukebox

I’ve always had a hard time creating playlists for parties. I don’t tend to listen to the top 40’s and I have no idea what kind of music people really want to hear at the party. So I’ve been working on a few solutions for finding a good way to allow for crowd sourced music curation, because I hate when people unplug the stereo to plug in their phone/mp3 player to listen to one song!! Most of the projects involve writing custom apps and running local web servers. However, in a dire need for a solution for an upcoming party that was only days away and no time to finish writing code I had an idea.

Spotify + collaborative playlists.

The idea is simple and thanks to how Spotify works, I was able to pull it off. The idea is to create a playlist on Spotify, make it a collaborative playlist. Then you can share the link to the playlist, people can subscribe and add songs to it. The playlist actually updates in real time! (This is amazing!)

This is exactly what I did to make this happen:

• In Spotify, make a new “Party Playlist” and make it collaborative.
• Get the link to the playlist and make it into a QR code. I used http://qrcode.kaywa.com/ and make one for a URL. Save the image. Make a flyer/poster with instructions for people to downloaded Spotify, a barcode scanner, how to add songs, and include the image of the QR code. Post it near the stereo.
• Use a computer, or in my case an old phone that connected to the WiFi to be the playlist player. It will be hooked up to the stereo at all times. (No more unplugging/plugging in speaker pop!)
• Start the playlist and put on repeat. At first the playlist will start out small so make sure it keeps going. Eventually the playlist won’t get a chance to loop as it grows in length.

This worked better than I could have hoped for. Everyone loved the idea and said they were going to do it at their next party. I think it worked well because people like only a small amount of control, they don’t want the responsibility of being in charge, but they still want their voice to be heard. Adding one song at a time lets people do just that. My favorite, and I think the most interesting part was that the music selection evolved as the party progressed, it wasn’t a stagnant pool of songs people hear everyday or only the ones the playlist creator likes. It grew to be a playlist filled with great new songs, old classics, and even the ridiculous becoming the perfect playlist.