Music discovery · Public experiment

Listening Room

Start with the lineup. Find the artists. Actually hear the music before the festival.

01 / The why

The problem worth solving

A large festival lineup is a wall of unfamiliar names. Existing playlists don't always make it easy to explore every act or understand which artists, recordings and stages are relevant to the experience you want.

02 / In the product

A look inside

Listening Room desktop product screenshot captured for the project's About and Help documentation. — Desktop listening-room experience — source project documentation capture.

Listening Room lineup view screenshot showing an artist browsing interface. — Lineup browsing on a narrow screen — source project documentation capture.

03 / Functionality

What the experience does

The public app provides a no-login way to browse event artists and open reviewed recordings.
Lineup exploration and artist-focused navigation help listeners move from names to music.
Playlist publication and coverage are intentionally gated by verified sources, listening checks and platform constraints; don't assume an unpublished playlist is public.

04 / Direction

Decisions I made — and why

Breadth before depth

Start by representing each artist instead of filling the experience with tracks from already-familiar headliners.

Two different discovery jobs

A strict popularity-oriented Top 100 and a balanced all-artist discovery list answer different questions; they should not masquerade as one ranking.

Official recordings, not random matches

Credited releases, collaborations and official remixes are eligible; bootlegs and full DJ mixes are not automatically treated as track matches.

Quota limits are product constraints

YouTube discovery work was staged and checkpointed with explicit rate and usage limits instead of treating API access as unlimited.

05 / The process

Building alongside AI

I set the music curation rules, approved inclusion criteria and public-release boundaries. AI assistants helped research sources, build the catalog/discovery pipeline and test navigation.

The work used repeatable checkpoints to distinguish an identified match from a reviewed recording and a private playlist from a public release.

The project deliberately shows what AI can accelerate, and what still needs human listening, rights judgment and verification.

06 / Where it stands

What came of it

The public no-login listening experience exists; the catalog and playlists continue to grow under review gates. Listening Room is unofficial and not affiliated with EDC or Insomniac.