Beatmonkey

Besides my passion for technology and programming, I also have a deep love for music. Both listening to and making music are among my favourite things to do. Since 2017 I’ve been producing music as a hobby and side hustle for various artists from the Dordrecht region.

An important part of this is sending my instrumental productions — also known as beats — to artists. They can choose to write to these beats, with the goal of an eventual release. I usually do this over WhatsApp, and sometimes by email. This is cumbersome, though, because the beats often “drown” among the other messages.

There are also platforms built for this purpose, such as the well-known BeatStars.com. That platform focuses on selling beats and offers producers a good way to earn money. Still, it has its downsides: it’s hard to get discovered without paying for promotion, the competition is fierce, and BeatStars takes a percentage of your earnings.

These downsides inspired me to combine my two passions and, as part of the course Programming 5, build my own beat platform.

The platform is built with Laravel and uses Blade templates for the front-end. On the platform, artists and producers can among other things:

• Create an account;
• Upload beats, complete with metadata such as a cover image, genre and BPM;
• View, edit, download, show/hide and delete beats;
• Listen to beats without having to download them first;
• Filter by genre and BPM, or search by name;
• Like or dislike beats.