Streaming platform for professional musicians and their fans

Being a music aficionado and coming from a family of musicians, our client was very upset by the ban on live performances due to the coronavirus pandemic. He came up with an idea of creating an application that would allow musicians not to go out of business and help fans stay in touch with their favorite performers.

EffectiveSoft was chosen because our team has expertise in social networking, streaming, and other technologies that the client needed, and we had also successfully implemented some joint projects before.

Since it was an artistic project and visual effects played an essential role, the UI implementation turned out to be quite tricky. All screen state changes had to be animated, and music videos in TV mode were needed to switch by genre, artist, location, etc.

Another challenge was to implement an advanced search approach to help users find relevant content quickly.

The client had a preferable set of technologies and strict requirements concerning third-party services to be used in the project, so in some cases the team had to learn on the fly.

This original solution brings considerable benefits to both users and musicians. Fans can have the latest news about their favorite performers or bands, listen to tracks, and watch clips in TV mode. Musicians can give online concerts, write posts, keep everyone up to date on releases, and more.

As a result, our client received an MVP (minimum viable product) of Bands’ streaming music service that is available on iOS, Android, and Web. The application combines live streams, TV, recorded performances, music tracks, posts, merchandising, and more and provides an intriguing alternative to many other products on the market.

Lively and bright design

For more seamless and delightful navigation, we implemented design animation by using the video overlay and the LottieFiles service. Lottie is a JSON-based animation file format, which is available on any platform and can scale up or down without pixelation.

All the music videos uploaded to the app may be watched in TV mode. There are several channels such as arcade (all videos of users), artists, hot (most popular videos), live (all events), etc. They are played back in a certain sequence, and users swipe upwards and downwards to change the channel or clip.

Cassandra database

One of the client’s requirements was the integration of Apache Cassandra. It has traditionally been known as an extremely powerful database that can meet the most demanding use cases. We used the DataStax version of Cassandra as it was best suited for the project needs.

Efficient integrations

We integrated the app with AWS Cognito to allow users to sign in through social identity providers, such as Apple, Google, Facebook, and Amazon, and through enterprise identity providers, such as SAML and OpenID Connect.

We also implemented GetStreamAPI for social networking features – activity streams and chats. To ensure video streaming and full-featured TV operation, we implemented Mux Video API.

To provide users with the most relevant results of their search queries, the product team plugged in a powerful search API – Algolia.