Vol 06
Earlier this year I had the best 30th birthday. I was invited to Tim Sweeney's Apple Music studio in Union Square to talk about what a new website for Beats in Space could look like.
The brief was bigger than just a better looking site. We wanted to make it easy to publish and promote the show every week, and give the archive room to keep growing. 27 years of DJs, records, mixes, parties, images and videos. We wanted to celebrate that effort with a web experience where navigating the catalogue feels as immersive as the mixes themselves.
We dove right in and started migrating and refactoring the database. 2,462 mixes, 40,250 tracks, 16,854 DJ pages.
Thomas Hervé led the design, conceptualizing a graphic experience that lets the content shine. Intentional about interactions, inviting you to give in to the archive and find something that inspires you.
Open a mix and you get its full tracklist. Click any track and you land on the artist page, where you can see every other mix that artist was played in. From there you can find yourself in another show, another set of DJs you haven't heard of.
With 16,854 artist pages, the connections between them are the most useful thing on the site, so we made them the main way you get around. The UI wants to force you into rabbit holes. Half joking, we wanted people to doom scroll.
You can leave comments on shows, save tracks you want to come back to, and play Apple Music shows without leaving the site.
A large part of the build was leveraging Sanity as the content engine. It let us map co-occurrences to relate tracks to mixes, and power search with embeddings, so you can query "cosmic acid house" and actually get results.
This was an absolute dream project. Tim, Thomas and I all shared a deep passion for the show and what it represents to the dance music community.
Beats in Space is a true example of creativity, passion and dedication. A lifelong devotion to something you love.
Dive into the new site. Make an account, get lost in the catalogue, save mixes and leave comments. Enjoy :)