SWN Festival 2013 - plans

Last year I had a go at creating a couple of web apps based around the bands playing the SWN Festival here in Cardiff. I love SWN with all my heart, it’s a permanent fixture in my calendar and even if (when) I leave Cardiff it’ll be the one thing I come back for every year. It’s a great way to see and discover new bands, but sometimes the sheer volume of music on offer can be overwhelming. So I wanted to see if I could create some web apps that would help to navigate your way through all the bands, and find the ones that you should go and see.

The first was a simple app that gathered artist tags from Last.FM, allowing you to see which artists playing the festival had similar tags - so if you knew you liked one artist you could find other artists tagged with the same terms. The second (which technically wasn’t ever really finished) would allow you to login with a last.fm account and find the artists whose tags best matched the tags for your top artists in your last.fm profile.

I liked both these apps and found them both useful - but I don’t think they went far enough. I only started development late in the year, about a month before the festival, so didn’t have a lot of time to really get into it. This year I’m starting a lot earlier, so I’ve got time to do a lot more.

Firstly I’d like to repeat the apps from last year, but perhaps combining them in some way. I’d like to include more links to the actual music, making it easy to get from an artist to their songs by including embeds from soundcloud, spotify, youtube etc. I’d also like to try making a mobile app guide to the festival (probably as an android app as the official app is iOS only). I’m hopeful that given enough free time I should be able to get some genuinely useful stuff done, and I’ll be blogging about it here as I work on it.