How It Works
Creative Differences is a Slack community where we (and our music-nerd friends) share real music recommendations from actual humans, and maybe discover some good music we haven’t heard before. We’ve organized it into several Slack channels.
#music-recs — Share and see music recommendations
#song-storm — Once a day, Loopie will drop a prompt to spark song-sharing threads — for example, ‘Bands that only released one album’ or ‘The first person to see this picks a year; everyone else shares a favorite song from that year.’
#mood-board — Loopie drops vibe-based prompts based on energy, mood, or aesthetic — a space to build playlists that feel a certain way, like songs that feel like wearing your favorite sweater or the musical equivalent of a Saturday morning bowl of cereal.
#songs-like-this — Share a song and ask for similar tracks
#playlists — Share playlists you’ve curated
Then our bot, Loopie, acts as a butler that helps you discover, organize, and play music in the community. We wanted to use technology to help — not replace — the human side of sharing music. Users type in /commands (like the ones below) to build playlists from songs in a channel, spark new recommendations, and drop the occasional creative prompt when things get quiet.
/song_prompt — Get a prompt to inspire your next pick, or add a prompt idea of your own. These feed into our companion app, and power the messages that get shared automatically in #song-storm and #mood-board
/playlist_this — Use this to create a playlist. This will capture all songs shared in a given channel, connect to the Spotify API, and generate a playlist for you. You can also add commands like ‘day’ or ‘month’ to get songs from only a selected date range.
/obscore — Get an obscurity score for any band (remember this one?)
/i_live_here — Share your location for the community map
Finally, our companion app tracks the songs you’ve reacted to, shows every prompt we’ve ever shared, and includes a leaderboard highlighting who’s getting the most reactions from their posts.
Notes from Building
Build where people already are.
We’ve all heard it a million times: “Can you build chat for my app?” Then comes the long conversation about what it would take to recreate Slack or Discord. For this, we decided to start with a platform that already works, one people already know how to use.
Slack struck the right balance of structure, tech familiarity, casual-enough interactions, and ease of use. Easy-to-make Slackbots paired with threaded discussions made it simple to spark and encourage real conversations about music. A good reminder that great user experiences can be built on great, established tech that people already understand.
A companion app that supports the community.
Since Slack already handles organizing into channels, sharing messages, and even bookmarking or reacting to songs (we use emoji reactions for this), we didn’t need to rebuild any of that. Instead, we created a companion app to extend what Slack already does well.
Our companion app connects to Slack via API and adds a few key views:
It also powers the API that Loopie uses to do things like generate playlists through Spotify.
Now get out of the way.
When real people share music they love, not just what they think will get likes, you discover songs you’d never find otherwise. You hear from people with different tastes, perspectives, and stories. That’s what makes it interesting.
Loopie, our Slackbot, handles the busywork so the humans can focus on the fun part: sharing, discovering, and talking about music. It drops prompts to spark conversation, builds playlists from threads, and keeps everything organized so the community feels effortless to be part of.
Sound interesting? Come join us and see for yourself.
