Hops Music: Friend-Curated Playlists

Hops Music is a tool that creates personalized playlists by blending what your friends are currently listening to with your own musical tastes. Instead of relying on algorithm-driven recommendations like Spotify's default discovery, it puts your actual community—the people you trust—at the center of finding new music to enjoy.

Here's how it works: you sign up with your Spotify account, add friends to follow within the Hops community, and mark your favorite artists. The app then watches what your friends are recently playing and generates playlists based on that activity, filtered by your preferences. So if three of your friends are all listening to a new indie band, you'll be more likely to see songs from that artist in your personalized playlist. You can save these playlists, add or remove songs, and manage them the way you would in Spotify itself.

The appeal is straightforward: music recommendations from people you actually know feel more trustworthy and often more exciting than distant algorithms. You're growing your musical knowledge through your community rather than through marketing data. The README emphasizes that Hops values "community and curation" as an alternative to Spotify's focus on volume and access. The team is also planning to add concert information from services like Songkick in the future, so you could discover that your favorite artist from a friend's playlist is playing nearby.

Currently, the app is live on Heroku and handles the core features you'd expect: creating and updating playlists, adding and deleting songs, and building your friend network. It was built with Node.js and Express on the backend, MongoDB for data storage, and uses the Spotify API to pull in all the music data and recommendations.