Our goal for localify last summer was to launch a professional grade version of Localify. This included developing:
- a professional-grade Spring Boot backend
- a well-designed React-based Web Application
- an artist and event music recommendation system
- A robust set of data scrapers to collect information about local artists and music events
For the most part, our team (Griffin, Paul, Cassandra, Bridget, and Ruth) accomplished these goals and we launched this new version of Localify at the International Society on Music Information Retrieval (ISMIR) in San Francisco in November 2025.
Since then, Localify.org has been up and running for seven months. We have made incremental progress during the academic year but it is hard to make big improvements when school is session since everyone (including myself) is spread thin with classes and extra curricular activities. But this “slow time” allows us to learn what is working, what needs to be improved, and what we should do next.
This summer, we have a relative young development team (Abe, Fisher, Robby, Harish) but luckily graduting seniors Griffin and Paul are able to help mentor the team for the early part of the summer. The five major tech goals are:
- launch Swift-based iOS app for iPhones and iPads (Fisher, Robby)
- build support for artist recommendation at community festivals (Paul)
- clean up our existing React-based web app (Griffin)
- develop scrapers to find more granular local music events (Abe)
- improve our DevOpps with containerization, continuous integration, and testing (Paul, Abe)
- create a Java-based Android app (Harish)
The other major goal is to have our marketing team (Stella, August) develop & implement an ambitious outreach plan to grow the number of people who actively use Localify. This plan includes:
- Outreach to artists, venue owners, festival organizers, and music industry influences
- Develop a ground game with Physical Media (stickers, posters, swag) that we can us to promote Localify in key cities (e.g., Ithaca, NY and Fort Collins, CO).
- Improve our Social Media game with more regular posts on Instagram, Blue Sky, and Medium.
- Work with festival orgranizer to launch special Festival-Specific Personalized Artist Recommendation Pages (e.g., Porchfests, FOCOMx, SXSW, Grassroots)
This promises to be a fun summer. Live music is the best and we are excited to help grow local music scenes.
All the best,
Doug
ps – Here is a video that Ithaca College produced about Cassandra and Bridget’s experince working on Localify last summer. The focus on our work starts at 1:50 into the video.