Collaboration creates innovation
Welcome to MusicRoom! We're a music-sharing platform for college creatives looking to share their music and collaborate with other musicians in their area! We know how hard it can be to find other musicians and network. We aim to provide a user-friendly interface and platform to provoke collaboration — after all, collaboration creates innovation.
Many existing platforms let users share their music such as Spotify, Instagram, and SoundCloud, but there are no designated platforms that are solely dedicated to musicians and connecting them online. MusicRoom is for musicians, specifically musicians in colleges and universities nationwide. It provides a place for college students to share songs, form groups, and interact with other student musicians. We think our app should work intuitively, as we used common design conventions and features that are seen in other social apps.
MusicRoom enables users to search based on their interests. For example, a student can look for a singer near their location by searching for schools local to them. Users can also search based on skills and genre; we want to include musicians of diverse backgrounds and experiences. We account for skill sets, genres, and school attending as we want musicians to highlight the key details when connecting. The app additionally encourages users to share their snippets online when they want to share their songs and musical projects. Through a platform that lets users interact with other works, it forms interactions and communities between musicians when discovering new and trending music made by other students. The app supplements musicians in colleges and universities to be creative and innovative by fueling inspiration and discovery, what will you create on MusicRoom?
Current music-sharing social media platforms suffer from the oversaturation of posts. For example, 20% of Spotify’s catalog has no streams whatsoever (Eriksson 2019). This poses the question — how many songs are there that have the potential to be successful but are not due to being overshadowed on the platform? Furthermore, current music streaming platforms focus more on broadcasting music rather than driving collaboration and building a community of musicians. How can we provide more exposure for beginning and young artists? To address both issues, we thought that providing a platform for these artists who might have a challenging time getting a foothold in the music industry would be helpful.
Our idea was also motivated by our firsthand experiences. We are more than just students and developers — we have personal hobbies and one of which is creating music. However, as people who are not actively pursuing a career in music or musical education, we have found it hard to create the same network as we have in the fields that we are studying. We have found that currently there are few social networking platforms that specifically cater to connecting young creatives, and those that do are either much too specialized or have a poor interface design that is hard to use. Because of this, our focus was to create a platform that young musicians would want to use, whose design was easy to use, and aesthetically ambiguous, so as not to inadvertently prioritize a certain style of musician over another.
The most essential aspect of the app is the profile page, which allows users to display their skills, genre, school, about, snippets, and posts. External apps such as Spotify, Youtube, and Instagram are also linked to the app; users can go to the external apps from there because those apps are very popular and users want to share their interests with other musicians. Users will find the snippets section particularly useful; they may remove and change the snippets. They can also manage and view comments on their posts, as well as remove and edit them.
Users can search for other musicians using search categories such as skills, genre, and school since these criteria would fit their demands when looking for other musicians.
The app's "Just for you" page allows users to browse recommended singers, drummers, and popular snippets depending on their search as suggestions are frequently highly beneficial when users are unable to find favorites.
Users can upload their snippets, images, and descriptions in several formats on the upload page because users would expect to upload different files.