I believe that anybody can create a hello world project that exists of an idea, and before you know it, you have 15 unfinished ideas that just disappear by the wayside. I try to create projects that have longevity, afterall any long standing business is built on longevity, not a fly by night idea, although ideas do keep the world turning. I think I have found a quote that is relavent.
Being the richest man in the cemetery doesn’t matter to me. Going to bed at night saying we’ve done something wonderful… that’s what matters to me.
-Steve Jobs, Apple co-founder
The backstory to this project, is that I often listen to music on different platforms like Apple Music, You Tube, Amazon Music and Spotify. I don't listen to enough music to warrant a subscription, and often I just find myself listening to Capital Dance and Radio One, as I was listening to capital dance the other day, I kept listening to really good songs that I liked, but realised that I had to wait for them to get replayed on the radio in order to hear them, I often found myself going to the capital one playlist, and trying to find the song that I heard, and this was taking a while. and this is how the idea for Only Musik came about. I wanted a service that let me listen to the latest dance songs that I hear on Capital Dance and Radio One, new upcoming songs that are not entirely main stream, and I wanted to play them in the order I wanted to hear them.
As a write this, the OnlyMusik website does a few functional things:
- Constant generation of songs from Capital Dance and the top 40 charts.
- Continuous playing
- Create and Share playlists
- No adverts and very low operating costs
One of my passions is Music, I am passionate about this website, I will often have ideas that I think will make a great user experience.
There are a few different skills I have learnt in this process, and this site uses a few different technologies, these are:
- Cloudflare API
- Blazor Web Development
- Blazor API Development
- Events using Blazor
- Windows Services
- Mongo DB
- Google API Services
- C# Development
- Using LINQ Queries
- Bootstrap 5.3 and CSS
- Azure Services like SignalR
- RabbitMQ Queue's
- Concert and Ticketing API's
- Responsive web design
- Javascript Libraries and Events
As you have probably summised, there are a lot of different technologies that go into a finished product, a lot of ingredients that make the final cake, and it's for this reason why I prefer to develop on one idea, rather than continue to develop multiple ideas of different contexts, it's just a lot of context switching, that doesn't do anyone any favours. I keep having lots of ideas around the theme of music, things like a "Play All Songs by Artist", and algorithimic playlist generation based on a songs popularity and play count.
Lets segway slightly to IMDB, IMDB is THE movie database and it's creator
Colin Needham is an English computer scientist who founded the Internet Movie Database (IMDb). Needham was born on 26 January 1967 in Denton, Lancashire. He attended Audenshaw School and Clarendon Sixth Form College in Hyde, Cheshire, and graduated from the University of Leeds with a BSc (Hons) in computer science in 1988. He was its chief executive officer from its creation in 1990 until 2025, when he stepped down and instead took a role as its executive chairman.
IMDB was a hobby project started by Needham because of his love of films.
“I’ve been tracking everything I’ve seen for the last 37 years and in that time to now I have seen 10,315 unique films”
- Interview: Col Needham, Founder of IMDb, the world's number one movie database - techSPARK
- IMDb's current annual revenue estimate stands at $216M.
- At IMDb, the revenue per employee is estimated to be $203K.
IMDB was a hobby project started by Needham because of his love of films.
I am not by any means suggesting OnlyMusik.com is a multi-million dollar company, but I am merely suggesting that often great things are founded from ideas we are passionate about. Also, I do realise that the money orientated people don't care much for the technology, they are all about how it works, and how much people like it. For me this project isn't about making money or even getting thousands of users, although I do have to admit that I do believe it will scale very well based on the architecture. This project is a combination of passions, software development and musik. I have a list as long as my arm on my dev ops boards, and I have months if not years worth of ideas to implement so this isn't a finished project by any means, and as an early concept, I think it's a great start.
When developing a project, the devil is in the detail and it's key to understand that sometimes you can spend an obscene amount of time on the smallest detail. For example I have probably spent over 100 hours just working on the player and the player logic, and testing the control with different aspects.
This project isn't as easy as it looks to be honest, there is a lot of logic that goes into the player, into ensuring that the songs load sequentially, and the "Play Next" technology is the bit that interests me, the purpose of OnlyMusik.com is pretty straight to the point:
Be able to play a list of dance songs for free as a non-stop playlist
- Great for working, partying, the gym and driving.
There is also a lot of work that goes into maintaining the dataset of music and artists, and ensuring all the art work is correct and the album information is current and correct. Other areas that I can digress into include Mobile Applications, Marketing, Making Advertising Videos and other lead generation ideas. I don't believe I am quite ready to beat the drum with this just yet, there are a few different things I would like to iron out, and a few issues that my OCD can't deal with, but in turn what I plan to create is a fully functional service that is free to use, and has a functional purpose, not just a hello world idea with a domain name.
Only Musik isn't just a single serving idea, it's a community; If you are passionate about the latest dance music in a playlist, for FREE, and don't care much for videos, then check out onlymusik.com.
