The innate human desire to connect with one another and the deep inclination to share what we have discovered has led to social bonding over music for centuries all over the world. In the modern age, technology has revolutionized the way we communicate and connect with others, along with how we listen to music. Modern music listening and discovery has encountered four main obstacles: platform mismatch, group disorganization, personal recommendations not being encouraged, and finally, the discovery echo chamber.
To solve these problems, our team has invented Musibara ‒ a music-centered social networking app. The platform's goals include supporting collaboration and sharing through communities, or “herds.” Next, the platform will allow users to explore music through post tags, descriptors that can be added to posts to reference artists, songs, or albums. Additionally, our goals will include importing and exporting playlists to and from Apple Music and Spotify. Our final goal is to incentivize music enthusiasts to share their taste and opinions with the world through the use of rank-based post recommendation.
We are a team of five students in the CSCE department at Texas A&M University. This project was completed as part of our senior design course, CSCE 482, in the Fall 2024 semester.
Our final implementation of the site is hosted at https://musibara.com. The site is hosted with two Docker containers running on a single Amazon EC2 instance. As such, it is not built for handling large amounts of traffic, but rather, it allowed us to build an MVP of our idea. Depending on when you are reading this, the site may or may not have been taken down due to financial constraints.
For instructions on how to run the application locally, consult the README files at the top of the musibara-client and musibara-api directories.