Spins.FM

By 2010 users of social networks swelled. Developers were encouraged to use idenitifcation and sharing APIs that are now basically gone. But the record labels were still trying to catch up and reach young audiences. Specifically so they could tell them to request their song on the radio. The radio still being important to Billboard's ranking and the old school executives.

So my partner had the idea to bridge those worlds and develop a way to quickly contact your local radio stations and request the song they paid for. We'd sell it on a per single basis and run the website on the musicians facebook page. We would lower friction between requester and the station. The artists would tweet their fans to use our game to make requests. The fans earned coins as they tweeted and posted on Radio Stations social media pages with pre-prepared shout outs.

We went for a retro-modern look for the request widget that sat before the album art for many artists. Everything in the app was themeable and color coordinated with their specific marketing materials. Our app was essentially a brandable social spamming app. Users were encouraged to hit the app many times a day and hit every radio station. Users could only request once per station per hour, but the thousands that poured in, led to many stations contacting us. Our solution was to build a free app for stations to install and track song request in a visually pleasing way, as well as turning off the social posting on walls.

We built Spins as a desktop, mobile and facebook app, with an option to build into a white labelled native mobile app. There were also many iframe embeddable versions as well. The app was built with Ruby on Rails, for the JSON API and a CanJS frontend. We used Postgres and Redis for storage and Heroku for hosting. There was ample use of the old school, (let apps grab all the data) Facebook and Twitter APIs.