SideLine FM

The core challenge with any radio website: how do you let people browse without killing the stream? Most sites reload the entire page when you click a link. The audio stops. The listener has to hit play again. Do that enough times and they leave.

We solved this with page transitions that load new content without refreshing the browser. Click through to a track page, browse the charts, check your profile — the music never stops. The player sits outside the content area, persistent across every interaction. Analytics track these transitions as pageviews so the station still gets accurate listener data.

Radio stations play hundreds of tracks per day. Manually entering artist names, album titles, and artwork for each one would be a full-time job. We built a system that handles it automatically.

When a new track plays, the platform queries music databases for matching metadata. Album artwork downloads and caches locally. 30-second preview samples get stored for the "recently played" section. If a track has been seen before, the system recognises it and pulls from the existing record. No duplicate entries, no manual work.

Over the station's lifetime, this pipeline catalogued over 10,000 unique tracks and cached nearly 18,000 media files — artwork and audio samples — without any human intervention.

The platform watches the audio stream around the clock. Every time the track changes, a record gets written to the database: track ID, timestamp. This happens automatically whether anyone is actively managing the station or not.

This simple logging approach enabled several features. The "recently played" list always shows accurate, timestamped history. Listeners can scroll back through what aired and save tracks they missed. Station programmers can see exactly what played and when. And the data accumulates into a complete archive — useful for reporting, for understanding listening patterns, for proving to rights holders exactly what got airtime.

By the time broadcasts paused, the system had logged over 465,000 individual plays.

Social login removed the friction of registration. One click, and the listener has an account with their name and profile photo already populated. No forms, no password to remember.

Each user gets a personal favourites list. Hear something you like? One click saves it. Those favourites become the basis for custom playlists — listeners curating their own collections from the station's output. Profiles can be shared publicly, turning engaged listeners into promoters.

The engagement feeds back into the platform. Likes aggregate into charts showing what the community responds to. Comments attach to individual tracks, building conversation around the music. Activity feeds show what others are discovering. Every interaction becomes data the station can use to understand its audience.