Digital Jukebox
A digital jukebox letting guests queue music in pubs, bars and cafés — I led product at this early-stage startup.
FreeBird was a startup created by John Weiss (based in Chicago) and Robbie Swaddle (based in Barcelona). We teamed up to challenge the digital-jukebox market.
Our goal was to provide an easy way to introduce a music-on-demand in pubs, bars, restaurants, venues and cafés for:
- venue owners (low cost, easy maintenance and profit-making)
- musicians (providing extra earnings from music-on-demand)
- venue guests (people who’d like to hear their favourite song in their favourite bar).
As for a startup, the resources and financials were limited. Different time zones and our regular day jobs also slowed the project down. We all knew what’s the vision, what is the goal and how we all can benefit from it as well.
Onboarding
Easily onboard users on the app
Browsing
Search for bar based on your personal music taste.
Music catalogue
After entering the venue user can browse the catalogue of available music to bid.
Bidding
After finding your favorite track you can bid on it to be played next.
Project has failed for a few reasons.
Firstly, we badly researched the possibilities of integrating the Spotify API and its limitations.
Secondly, covid hit hard and we weren't able to test the ideas in a real world situation. However, after telling the story about this project to numerous friends we had a good feedback on the idea itself.