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Proposer: Jess Ochs-Willard
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Product name: Epsilon
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Tweet length summary: Physical media database and playlist manager
for radio stations
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Product summary: Epsilon will be a web service for both terrestrial and online radio stations that encourages the station’s DJs to log
the music they are playing, generate playlists accessible to the
general public either through the site or an embedded widget,
review and rate albums, songs, and artists, and access the reviews
and ratings of other DJs and possibly radio stations that use the
service. This will promote a deeper knowledge of the physical
library, which is increasingly overlooked in an age of Spotify,
Google Music, Youtube, etc., but which offers higher quality audio
and media that is often not available on any streaming
source.
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Customer base: Terrestrial and online radio stations with large
libraries of physical media. This is not a massive customer base,
but it seems like a tuned-down version of the business-to-business
software model (e.g. Salesforce) which to me is more interesting
than consumer apps
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What does it do for the customer: Epsilon makes available the full
contents of any radio station’s physical library, along with the
physical location of said media in the library, and offers
semi-crowdsourced ratings and reviews, so that DJs will know what
their peers like or dislike
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Personal statement: I’m the General Manager of the campus radio
station, WBRS, and I used to be the tech director, and it dismays
me to see DJs play all of their music off their computers. It
sounds worse, and it’s honestly super cool to browse through the
library and find new things. That’s too much of a commitment for
people, but it would be a great first step to allow them to find
out what other students like and where it lives, and maybe they’ll
find something else they like when they go to get that CD or
vinyl
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Basic Database Schema:
- Entity: Album
- Name
- Songs
- Artist
- Release Date
- Reviews
- Rating
- Location
- Length (time)
- Entity: Song
- Entity: Artist
- Entity: DJ
- Entity: Playlist