A song voting system for Spotify - A web application bringing democracy to the playback using Spotify’s Web API

Abstract

At social gatherings we often want to play music. With digitalization we are able to access almost any music in the world using music streaming providers, such as Spotify. Problems arise when many attendees at a same gathering want to choose what music will be played. Typically, one attendee at the time gets access to the playback device, usually somebody’s personal smartphone, to choose music. This is both a privacy issue and a suboptimal solution to allow many attendees to choose what songs to be played next. This thesis aims to solve this issue by developing a software solution which allows attendees to collboratively choose music without neither getting access to the playback device, downloading apps nor creating accounts. A design for a browser-based song voting application is presented in this thesis, which allows an attendee to search and vote for songs to be played where the song with the most number of votes is the next song to be played. The design is then implemented taking advantage of Spotify’s Web API which allows software to remotely control what music is played on a device running the Spotify app.