If you’ve been using social media over the last week, you may have noticed the latest trend: Instafest. This is a website where users connect to their Spotify or Apple Music accounts, and are able to see what their music festival lineup would be, featuring their favorite music artists.
The popularity of Instafest has grown monumentally in less than two weeks, with even celebrities such as Questlove, director Edgar Wright, and rapper 24kGoldn also participating in the trend.
This is all made possible by a 20-year-old University of Southern California student from Irvine named Anshay Saboo. He’s a computer science major, completing his junior year of college.
Saboo says he got his inspiration around six months ago, during music festival season when people were talking about Coachella.
Get top local stories in Southern California delivered to you every morning. >Sign up for NBC LA's News Headlines newsletter.
“I remember I was in bed scrolling through TikTok one day, and seeing all these posts for music festivals and that just got me thinking about if I could plan a music festival, what artists would be a part of my dream festival?" he recalled.
“Going off of that train of thought, I conceptualized the idea of a simple website where people could connect their Spotify accounts, and generate their dream music festival and be able to share it on social media with their friends.”
He shared that at first, the site could only be connected to Spotify, but over the last week he’s been working on expanding it to include other sites such as Apple Music, which is now available, and any other music streaming sites.
Local
Get Los Angeles's latest local news on crime, entertainment, weather, schools, COVID, cost of living and more. Here's your go-to source for today's LA news.
He also recently added a “basic score” feature, which rates your music based on how niche it is from 0 to 100. A high score means your festival includes mostly popular artists, while a low score means your festival has more niche artists.
Users can also create a music festival based on artists they’ve listened to the most of “all-time,” last six months, or even as recently as the last four weeks.
With privacy being an issue that is constantly talked about in terms of social media, Saboo assured users that their privacy is completely protected.
“All the data that goes into it is 100% secure, it's never collected or shared with any third parties or even with me,” he said. “The data stays on the user's device and is only used to generate the music festival. Other than that, the data is not used for anything and is not stored anywhere.”
Saboo also shared he feels extremely lucky that it coincidentally was finished and released around the same time as Spotify Wrapped. Many users have taken to Twitter to share that they’ve enjoyed it just as much or even more than their Spotify Wrapped.
“It's a really incredible experience and I've been loving all the positive feedback I've been getting,” said Saboo. “It's really inspired me to put more work into platforms such as this one, and expand on work like this in the future.”
This isn’t Saboo’s only success. He developed a previous project called “Grades” when he was a junior in high school for students to be able to track their academic progress. He says it grew in a matter of two years to over 250,000 downloads from students all across the U.S. He said it allowed him to refine his abilities in order to keep creating valuable websites for people.
Though he still doesn’t know what his next project will be, he looks forward to the opportunities that will open up from his latest success, and hopes to continue creating apps and websites that bring people together.
