DJ-51

DJ-51

Hyper-local social network for music discovery

2015, Cachaça 51

Creative Direction, Product Design, Art Direction

Musical taste is very personal. Our collections and libraries are an essential part of who we are. Sharing our musical preferences helps us connect with each other. Finding the right song to share can be difficult, especially since we now have access to more music than we could ever listen to.

DJ-51 creates a small social network designed to understand the musical preferences of the people in a defined space and generates a playlist from it. Since it only curates the music of people currently inside the space it becomes an ephemeral and intimate experience. The nature of this experience cannot be translated to more traditional forms of social sharing, because the interaction is not mediated by an interface but by the ambience it creates. DJ-51 only enhances an already existing interaction, it doesn’t define it.

Because it is built upon the social trust we already have, DJ-51 facilitates the discovery of music on a more personal level. We believe that no matter how “smart” an algorithm can be, a machine will not be able to understand you outside your social circle. That is why to construct your playlist we do not rely on the “if - then” approach that defines most algorithmic recommendations.

A companion application was created for live events to support a huge amount of participants, and featured a visualization of the network to guide party goers through initial interactions.

A companion application was created for live events to support a huge amount of participants, and featured a visualization of the network to guide party goers through initial interactions.

To create the playlist DJ-51 creates aggregated collections of all the songs each participant shares from their Spotify account. It looks for overlapping songs, then overlapping artists with unmatched songs. It adds all of those tracks to the playlist. Leveraging the EchoNest and the Music Genome Project it will search for artists that are similar to the ones already on the playlist and match them against the ones in the aggregated collection. Those artist’s songs will be added to the playlist too. To select the final 51 songs, DJ-51 sorts the playlist using one of the algorithmic strategies based on the mood selected by the user.

DJ-51 amplifies your connection to your friends, the space and the moment through music.

Manifest Video

Pruduction House: LeCube

Accolades

  • Short List, Direct Marketing for Cachaça 51, DJ-51. — El Sol. Festival Iberoamericano de la Comunicación Publicitaria, 2015
  • Short List, Mobile and Web for Cachaça 51, DJ-51. — El Sol. Festival Iberoamericano de la Comunicación Publicitaria, 2015