Music has an incredible way of setting the tone for any gathering, and that’s what sparked the idea for Queue’d.

Q ueue’d was an in-house application designed and built to be a new music management system for bars, restaurants, and other entertainment venues. With Queue’d, the crowd takes control of the music, collectively deciding what songs are played and in what order based on popular vote.

At the core of Queue’d was extensive product and industry research, a service we continue to provide for our clients to help refine any ideas and turn them into working products. We interviewed a number of bar and restaurant managers, along with hundreds of people, to design, refine, and develop a platform that’s easy to use for both the venue and the user. From our research, we learned the existing problems, cost barriers, and the various industry dynamics necessary to build a platform for businesses to automate their music system.

The Technology

The system is comprised of an iPad app, an iPhone app, and an Android app - all built natively in Swift 3.0 and Java, respectively. Both mobile apps heavily utilize the Spotify SDK to serve streaming music to the clients and retreive track metadata like album art, song length, genre and more. As far as the backend, we handled all real-time needs using Google's Firebase socket layer, and heavy utilization of Cloud Functions for serverless microservices that did not need any persistant disk use. All data is stored and persisted accross 3 separate environments, and delivered via a Content Delivery Network (CDN) when needed by a user in a specific locale.