“Hacking” College Radio Play List Data
Another side-project of mine over the last few months has been Feedcrush.com. If you like music and discovering new artists, Feedcrush is a great place to see what one of the top college radio stations in the country is playing.
The site simply tracks radio station (WERS in Boston) song plays over time (currently, about 16 months worth). You can comment and rate songs and there are links to listen to most songs. Eventually I plan on trending the play data for patterns , but haven’t gotten around to it. I still think there’s a “bigger” idea here, but I haven’t had time to fully work it out either.
The design was inspired by Gmail’s “labels” tool. While I was testing the application, I was receiving automated emails that I filtered into a red Feedcrush Gmail label. After seeing it for about a week, I thought, “that would make a cool ‘logo’”. The Flash graphs are powered by amCharts.
My biggest hurdle to date has been data normalization. WERS’s play lists rely on DJs to manually enter the song data, which can get ugly fast. While I do some cleaning to remove extra spaces etc, I’ve yet to accommodate differences like “&” vs “and” or misspellings. If you have any thoughts, feel free to share them in the comments below.
