Spotify Instafest – Your Personal Music Festival Poster
Spotify Instafest turns your playlist into a personal festival concert poster.
Summertime is typically for music fans with concerts like Coachella, Lollapalooza, BottleRock, Glastonbury, and Woodstock making up the list of the music festivals that bring in fans from across the globe. Sometimes, though, music festival lineups are not exactly what one is looking for and you know if given the opportunity, you could give fans a lineup worthy of their attendance. Now, music lovers will get a chance to see what their music fest would look like with a new app called Spotify Instafest.
The Spotify Instafest app was created by Anshay Saboo, a University of Southern California computer science student who came up with the idea when he began to think about what the Coachella music festival lineup would look like if he were able to choose the artists. Saboo quickly turned his thinking into action.
“I remember I was in bed just scrolling through TikTok. And I was looking at all these festival posts. And I was like, ‘If I was planning this festival, I’d want this person, and this person. Those are going to be headliners,'” he explained to SF Gate. “So, I kind of took that idea and ran with it. That same day, I had a working prototype that had the Spotify integration and everything.”
Turns out it was a little more difficult to put together than Saboo first thought. He was able to get the app’s core functionality to work, but what slowed him down was the app’s design details. Saboo dragged on the project up to Thanksgiving break, when he decided to get back to it and finish the app.
“I just worked on it for a full day, finished it, and then posted it online,” Saboo said. “And now here we are within a week, and somehow it just steadily exponentially grew over the past week. And we’ve had over six and a half million users on the app, and it’s still going up fast, too.”
SPOTIFY INSTAFEST USES LISTENING DATA TO CREATE A MUSIC FESTIVAL
So, what exactly is the Spotify Instafest app? Basically, Saboo’s app takes a look at your Spotify account and more importantly, your listening data. It will break it all down and spit it out into a music festival poster.
Here are the steps one will need to take to get their very own Music Festival poster from Spotify Instafest.
- Go to the Instafest website here and choose Sign in with Spotify.
- Enter your Spotify login information. Select login. You must have a Spotify account to see your Spotify Instafest poster.
- Privacy information will pop up next. Be sure to review it and when ready, hit agree.
- Your personalized fest lineup will appear.
Once you get your personalized Spotify Instafest lineup, you can customize it. Saboo has built in options that will allow app users to include their top artists from the last four weeks, the last six months, or all-time. Spotify Instafest users will also be able to choose one of three styles that include Malibu Sunrise, LA Twilight, or Mojave Dusk.
Finally, users get to name their music festival. For now, it appears that the Spotify Instafest name is one Spotify username with “fest” added to it. Once complete, users will be able to save the results and share them over social media or they can download the poster’s image to a computer or smartphone.
Spotify isn’t the only music streaming service that users can have fun with. Saboo says his Instafest can also be used with Last.fm. Now, if Apple Music users are curious if the app can be used on Apple’s platform, unfortunately, for now, it cannot be used with Apple Music. Though Saboo says it won’t be long before Apple Music listeners are able to use it.
Although his app isn’t yet available for Apple Music, it is still growing in popularity and Saboo has a few musicians to thank. The first one on his list to thank is Questlove. It was Questlove’s big share that got the ball rolling for Saboo.
“The first one I saw was Questlove,” said Saboo. “That was incredible to me, someone on that level that I looked up to posting something that I made. And he looked like he had a good time using it, that he was happy with his festival, too.”
Questlove’s Spotify Instafest was called the Ahmirkhalib thompsonfest and had three headliners, one of which was expected (Prince), while the other two raised some eyebrows. The first of the two Betty Davis, the funk musician, and ex-wife of Miles Davis. The second was “Binaural Beats Sleep,” which forced Questlove to respond to his own Instagram post.
It wasn’t only Questlove who handed out a big share for Saboo and his Spotify Instafest. Movie director Edgar Wright (Shaun of the Dead) was another and he took to his Instagram to share his results. His three-day headliners were Jockstrap, Steven Wright, and Arcade Fire.
Wright felt he had to explain how Steven Wright became one of his headliners saying on his Instagram, “Hey, I listen to Steven Wright to get to sleep. He’s my Headspace and I stand by it. He only has two albums: 1985’s ‘I Have A Pony’ and then 22 years later, 2007’s ‘I Still Have A Pony’. Which, frankly, are incredible names for his entire discography.”
Saboo isn’t resting on his laurels when it comes to the growing popularity of his Spotify Instafest. While he is watching it grow, he is also reaching out to bigger celebrity names hoping that they too would share just like Questlove and Edgar Wright have. Saboo has tweeted to Lebron James and Elon Musk, hoping at some point they will create their own Bronfest and Muskfest.
The Spotify Instafest app creator has yet to divulge his own fest lineup and says at some point he will, but he is waiting to hit a follower count (he hasn’t given out that number) before he does. He did let slip that his lineup will include musical artists Drake and Kendrick Lamar.
At the present time, Saboo is not working on any other projects although he feels Spotify Instafest is a work in progress. He continues to work on the Apple Music functionality and hopes to include Amazon Music as well. He does note that both of those music streamers are very stingy with supplying their data.
