Show HN: SameTunes – A Music Compatibility Platform for Spotify (opens in new tab)

Nice work, it looks really polished! What I would suggest improving is the single user experience: what I can do without involving friends. Right now I only see a huge list of strangers in alphabetical order. Picking someone at random seems pointless. However, if strangers could be sorted by match, that could be really interesting. That could also serve as a benchmark for my matchscore with friends.

If this is prohibitively costly in your current setup, I would suggest mapping each user profile to an embedding vector and find best matches using approximate nearest neighbors, that scales really well.

I find the marketing message a bit hard to swallow. The perfect answer for “what kind of music do you listen to” in person shouldn’t be something where we stop the flow of conversation and pull out our phones. It’s unclear to me why I’d want to use this. It would be helpful to see some example screenshots on the home page for be to better understand the value.

It's interesting that these kind of false premises come up often on HN. Don't get me wrong, I don't like PHP either, but nowadays. PHP is just as "modern" as many other languages in use. And with frameworks like Laravel and Symfony, it stacks up well against the likes of Ruby on Rails, Django or any NodeJS based stack. And let's not forget that the majority of websites and webapps runs on PHP.

Good eye and good question!

When I first joined, the existing codebase was already built out in PHP on a LAMP stack. I was really opposed to it at first but I've learned to love it since. The safety, speed, and size of a compiled language on the web is something most modern frameworks can't compete with.

I, personally, have built a ton of in-house APIs here aiming to "modernise" php and am really proud of the outcome. It's nowhere as safe, readable, or dynamic as something like a Rust or Swift but PHP is definitely a strong competitor for the modern web (IMO).

This article https://mcfunley.com/choose-boring-technology also really helped me come around early on.

That's totally fair. I wish Spotify gave us more granularity in the data we ask for, I don't think we need the blanket permissions a user has to grant us (as someone who just deleted their Facebook and soon Google accounts, this is really important to me).

We've reached out to a lot of local artists here in Atlanta and hope to use the platform to recommend and share their content to those interested.

Hand curating playlists is also a big feature we've been toying with. That's where something like Apple Music's hand crafted playlists are usually a lot stronger than Spotify's computed playlists.

I haven't heard of Calmradio, it's exactly what I've been looking for! I've resorted to listening to music through a cheap FM radio to try and break out of the algorithm hell Spotify tends to put me in.

Thanks for sharing!

I have to agree with your points. I'm someone who uses Soundcloud because a lot of the genres I'm into are not that popular and the producers have between 500 to 5k followers. Because of this, a lot of them simply aren't on Spotify. I would definitely use an app that connects me with other people that are into the same niche genre because it's so hard to find people into this music anyway. The cool thing though is that when you do meet someone in the same hard-to-find niche, the friendship is much more stronger.

tldr; OP add SoundCloud support please!

That's definitely something we're focusing on more now. Like qnsi mentioned, last.fm does a pretty good job of that -- I've been a fan since high school.

We, SameTunes, have an advantage when it comes to calculating a user's affinity for songs, artists and albums. Last.fm ranks your music by tracking how many times you've played (or "scrobbled") a song, songs by an artist, etc. SameTunes uses additional data Spotify publishes (like position in a created playlist, occurrences in your liked music, etc) to build a more well rounded representation of your music taste in the past and present.

There are definitely features we can, and plan to, add to help better portray this data to a user.

yes, its called last.fm :)