Epsilon
Physical media database and playlist manager for radio stations

  • Proposer: Jess Ochs-Willard

  • Product name: Epsilon

  • Tweet length summary: Physical media database and playlist manager for radio stations

  • 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.

  • 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

  • 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

  • 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

  • Basic Database Schema:

    • Entity: Album
      • Name
      • Songs
      • Artist
      • Release Date
      • Reviews
      • Rating
      • Location
      • Length (time)
    • Entity: Song
      • Name
      • Album
      • Length (time)
    • Entity: Artist
      • Albums
      • Songs
    • Entity: DJ
      • Playlists
    • Entity: Playlist
      • Songs
      • DJ