SPOTLIGHT

Most people now listen to music by major artists. This blocks smaller creators from getting a chance to get big in the industry, because bigger artists are blocking them off. Our website fixes this

Inspiration All of us love music a lot, but sometimes we find really good songs that aren’t given enough attention. Music artists put in so much effort into their work, but many of them are not recognized. To help showcase underrated artists and help people discover such artists, we created a website called spotlight.

What it does Spotlight is a Flask powered website that allows users to submit and discover songs from underrated and small artists to showcase. By using the spotify API, we can search Spotify directly, making it convenient for the user to add a song. Our website has a voting feature to let the community vote on songs to show them up higher on the list. The other part of our website is the discover page. This showcases all of the songs that users have submitted and voted on. By using the Spotify API, you can directly play the song from the website, without having to open up Spotify. On the discover page, the work of underrated artists who deserve more attention are showcased to the community.

How I built it We built our website by using html, CSS, and JavaScript for our front-end, while using flask, python and node js in the back-end. We used nodejs to create an API to store all of our data for songs, and votes for easy accessibility. Our website is also hosted on Amazon AWS so we can always expand on system resources if we see fit.

Challenges I ran into We ran into many problems whilst building our website. One of the bigger ones was allowing our AWS server to properly host the site by opening the ports up to the HTTP port which is 80. We also had issues with running our website 24/7 even if we logged out of the VM.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of We are very proud of successfully using AWS to host our website on the cloud.

What I learned We learned many unique things in AWS like setting inbound rules, outbound rules for our API, and also how to keep a program running 24/7. We also learnt how to run flask websites

What's next for Spotlight As a team we have decided that Spotlight will continue to be refined, and will have new features such as artist preview to make sure the right artist is being chosen, song preview, and also many user asked features that they could ask for on our GitHub page. We will also look into buying a domain to have a much cleaner url.

VIDEO LINK* https://drive.google.com/file/d/156wqmdkOt72lcvClKOPVJma2ri5n48cb/view?usp=sharing