If you’ve perused social media recently, you must have seen your friends and acquaintances post their Spotify Instafest on their Instagram stories or seen them leave their two-cents on a Twitter thread. With the anticipation of one’s personal 2022 Spotify Wrapped release just days away, music lovers are introduced to a new trendy way of sharing their top artists.
Instafest is a well-designed, third-party app, enabling people’s top listens to appear in what looks like a festival poster, mirroring a similar format to that of Coachella’s three day run. The number of times a Spotify user has listened to an artist determines whether the 33 artists are placed as featuring musicians or as the three headliners for each day.
The app also has different features available to get creative with the display of the lineup poster. There are tools that allow you to slightly alter the look and feel of the poster with three background options: LA twilight, Malibu Sunrise, and Mojave Dusk. The posters are customizable to display either the top artists from the last four weeks, last six months, and top artists of all time. There is also an option to hide your Spotify username from the top of the poster as well.
Upon first look at the Spotify Instafest posts, it’s hard not to believe that these lineups aren’t actually from a real festival. I mean, even the lineup format resembles that of any other three-day music festival. The ultimate give away for me was when I saw David Bowie listed on one poster, and suddenly noticed that every lineup was different. Some of those lineups seemed too good to be true, but, in reality, these people just have impeccable taste in music.
Anshay Saboo, a current University of Southern California student, created the app. Saboo is no newbie to app creation as he successfully developed and released several apps on the Apple and Google Play Store, including one to allow students to keep track of their academic progress called, The Grades App.
“Since I wrote my first line of code in an after-school class during elementary school, I’ve been fascinated by the power programming grants us to create change,” wrote Saboo on his personal website, anshaysaboo.com.
Sharing your listening results isn’t new as Instafest now joins rank with Spotify’s other interactive features, like Receiptify and Spotify Wrapped.
Receiptify is another Spotify feature that allows listeners share their top tracks on a grocery receipt. On the other hand, Spotify Wrapped provides listeners a thorough breakdown report of artists, songs, and podcasts that users listen to the most, as well as additional information, like the number of hours you’ve spent listening to Spotify content since Jan. 1. Similar to Receiptify and the much-anticipated Spotify Wrapped, you can post Instafest and share your music results on social media.
Anyone with a Spotify account can easily access their Spotify Instafest festival lineup by opening the Instafest website page at www.instafest.app and signing in with their Spotify account. After signing in, your dream lineup will appear on your screen.
If you stream a lot of music, there’s always something to look forward to at the end of the year. Whether you found your lineup results to be embarrassing, hilarious, or seriously accurate, Spotify Instafest was a nice treat and insight to what our friends enjoy listening to and certainly built up more anticipation for our annual Spotify Rewind list.
