Listen Up
by Grayson SchmidtSpring 2023
Fest of the Best
OK, it’s not an actual music festival — but we can dream with the help of a USC Viterbi student’s app!
by Grayson Schmidt Ever thought about what your dream music festival would look like?
Anshay Saboo ’24 has, and he turned it into a mobile application that quickly became a sensation.
The USC Viterbi School of Engineering student’s recent app, Instafest, pulls data from users’ Spotify accounts to create a dream lineup that can be shared with friends. The result is a graphic that breaks up users’ most listened-to artists by day, showcased in a poster patterned after a certain Southern California music festival (ahem, Coachella).
Saboo, a computer science major, began working on the app in spring of 2022 when the music festival season began. He knew that Spotify’s application programming interface — which allows him to pull information like users’ top artists — was relatively easy to work with.
By November, it was ready to go. “I just posted on my story, had a bunch of my friends post it, and the app just caught on like wildfire,” he says. A week later, he’d gained 16 million users.
“Music has an incredible power to bring people together,” Saboo says. “It’s just super cool to see everyone engaging with the app and each other online about music.”
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