Week #1 #

Team Formation and Project Proposal #

Team Members #

Value Proposition #

• Identify the Problem: Mashup (mesh. mash-up) compositions are popular and demanded. They have their own fanbase and provide an unique opportunity of blending strong sides of different musical compositions. Despite this, there are no music player apps that are specialized on mashups and provide functionality important to mashup listeners. Existing player applications do not allow for searching mashups based on original author or track (as they do not track or store such an information), thus making any mashup search almost impossible. Second problem is that most existing player applications are paid, which is inconvenient for users.

• Solution Description: We aim to introduce free mashup-centered player application to solve these problems. As an application itself is focused on mash-ups, convenient mash-up search will be implemented, allowing for an adequate process of looking for mash-ups of certain tracks and authors.

• Benefits to Users: Mash-up creators and listeners will have an opportunity to promote and/or find mesh tracks, while currently it is almost impossible to do it, because existing solutions ignore mash-ups in their design. For listener it hugely improves an amount of reasonably available content by introducing mash-up search algorithms. For creator the same algorithms mean that their product will be much more popular.

• Differentiation: There are currently no existing analogues which are useful and usable for mash-up creators and listeners, thus the difference our project aims to make is creation of a market itself.

• User Impact: Our product can raise the popularity of mashups by making them accessable, thus giving an impulse to the mash-up industry development and enlargement. New and old authors will have an opportunity to actually show their work to others.

• User Testimonials or Use Cases: Little social poll we conducted shows that users note that existing solutions are too commercialized for user’s good and that there are no existing solutions which allow for convenient mashup search. Users show mildly high level of interest in our product and opportuniies it can provide, both as completely free service and as a player application fully focused on mashups. Poll participants interested in mashups and knowledgeable about them show higher level of interest. They specifically focus on their answers on how alternative solutions are not suited for mashup compositions. Participants who are not interested in mashups are less enthusiastic, but agree that free player application would be interesting and useful for them, even if content does not fully suit their needs.

Lean Questionnaire #

Please answer the following questions related to the lean methodology:

1. What problem or need does your software project address?

   Lack of mashup-focused or at least mashup-friendly player applications.

2. Who are your target users or customers?

   Mash-up creators and listeners are the target audience of our project.

3. How will you validate and test your assumptions about the project?

   Our main goal is to provide covenient tool for a target audience, therefore we will focus on collecting user feedback about feature implementation we come up with to test how good it is.

4. What metrics will you use to measure the success of your project?

   Number of registered users and uploaded mashups in our service will be used as a measure of the project success.

5. How do you plan to iterate and pivot if necessary based on user feedback?

   We will focus on frequent user feedback collection, which will be used to produce the best possible version of feature implementation. Thus, we will use user feedback as an aid in deciding on the details of our product.

Leveraging AI, Open-Source, and Experts #

Additionally, for now we are going to focus on the frontend part of our product, while using open-source backend Spring Boot framework.

Defining the Vision for Your Project #

• Overview: SmashUp will be a streaming service focused on mashups, musical genre based on combining parts of several different compositions into one track. Currently SmashUp only exists as mobile application. Capstone project will be focused on creating Web version of this app.

• Schematic Drawings:

• Tech Stack: next.js, tailwindcss, eslint + prettier, jusky + lint-staged, jest