Update December 1, 11:15 AM IST: The Instafest site has started testing support for festival poster generation through Apple Music.
If your favorite music festival’s lineup didn’t live up to your expectations this year, don’t worry; a new app called Instafest will create a music festival poster for you based on your Spotify listening habits.
The free web app, created by developer Anshay Saboo, is pretty straightforward to use: sign in with your Spotify account, and it will generate a poster based on the artists to whom you most listened. You can customize the poster based on time intervals — last four weeks, last six months and all time.
You can also select different styles of posters such as Malibu Sunrise, LA Twilight and Mojave Dusk. Instafest app also calculates what it calls “Basic Score,” which might give you bragging rights about the niche music choice. The lower the score, the more niche your music festival is.
Once you generate the poster, you can choose to rename your music festival, hide/show your username and hide/show your Basic Score. If you want to remove support for this app, you can follow this guide to revoke access.
Saboo told TechCrunch he got the idea for the app while thinking about what Coachella’s lineup would look like if he picked the artists.
“I had the idea when I was in bed scrolling through TikTok one day. I saw people were posting videos from Coachella and I started thinking about how I would set the Coachella lineup if I could pick the artists. The thought process led to me thinking about generating a music festival graphic using a Spotify integration, and I built off from there,” he said.
The developer is already working on adding support for more platforms. The site already lets you generate a festival poster using your Last.fm listening history and support for Apple Music support is in the works. Saboo wants to add support for music streaming services such as YouTube Music, Deezer and Amazon Music down the road, he said, but cautioned that it might take some time as not every platform’s APIs are as friendly as those of Spotify.
#Instafest is no longer limited to just Spotify!
Support for https://t.co/CJb6aFgVfD is officially live at https://t.co/tVRDPy7gZO. Next up: Apple Music 🤫
— Anshay Saboo (@AnshaySaboo) November 29, 2022
Saboo is currently focusing on maintaining the app and adding more integration that makes sharing users’ festival lineups more fun. He said while it’s too early to comment on long-term plans, he is exploring possibilities of making a music-based social network around festival graphics generation.
Within hours of launch, Instafest has become a popular talking point on social media. Folks are posting their lineup to show off their good (or trash) taste in music. Saboo told TechCrunch that more than 5 million people have generated their Instafest poster.
I first thought: “I got a lot of explaining to do” 🤣🤣🤣😂😂
I don’t owe no one ish.
No More. https://t.co/S3Vnki1lVo
— Dr. Love (@questlove) November 28, 2022
Makes sense. pic.twitter.com/M17rKYOQmR
— Woman King (@keiopensdoors) November 28, 2022
The Instafest app seems like a mirror version of the Lineupsupply app, which lets you create playlists through music festival posters. So, if you like someone’s Instafest poster, you can use the LineupSupply app to make a playlist.
The app’s launch comes days before Spotify releases its Wrapped for users — showing customized listening habits across music and podcasts for each user — drops. So in a way, this feels like a Spotify Wrapped before Spotify Wrapped.