KVRX Hot 100 Blog

May 5, 2022

Lainie and Madison presenting their website in front of the Digital Innovations Capstone course.

As laid out in our first blog, the University of Texas seniors noticed a lack of resources allocated towards DJs who have not had experience in finding music that fit within the blacklist parameters set by KVRX, the student-run radio station based in Austin, Texas. The two of them have come together to solve this issue by creating a website that can be used by not only DJs at KVRX, but any Spotify user who wishes to find underground music.

Lainie and Madison set off to create an application and website that would allow users to find new music while staying compliant with FCC regulations for student-run radio stations. While they have since pivoted away from creating an application for iOS users, one still exists as a prototype. Their new focus has been on creating a website that demonstrates all the different aspects of music discovery: searching for artists, songs, and genres. 

On the index page, you can find links to featured artists, a master list of non-blacklisted songs, a list of genres available, and a searchable table of artists that redirect to their pages.

Working application in RStudio

March 30, 2022

The search for specialty music progresses as Lainie Dickey and Madison Nosek continue to build  KVRX Hot 100: The Mobile Application. As laid out in the previous blog, the University of Texas seniors noticed a lack of resources allocated towards DJs who have not had experience in finding music that fit within the blacklist parameters set by KVRX, the student-run radio station based in Austin, Texas. The two of them have come together to solve this issue by creating a mobile application that can be used by not only DJs at KVRX, but any Spotify user who wishes to find underground music.

Lainie and Madison and are furthering their work on the application in several different aspects such as coding and research. Working in RStudio with Shiny, Lainie has worked with different themes and methods of code such as decision trees and reactlog before landing on a simplified filtering system. Madison has been conducting market research, gathering information on user interfaces and audience preference for the layout of the application. The pair have completed a formal product pitch, a market research report and sent out the first draft of a research survey with intentions to rewrite it and send it back out with a demo of the current product. They finalized their product board and personas and have been diligently writing progress reports, revisiting a Trello board full of tasks consistently.

The current application for KVRX Hot 100 has been developed and presented on the 31st of March in front of an academic audience to demonstrate the new filtering system implemented for song selection.

To start, the pair has developed a database with three filters, “Genre,” “Clean/Explicit,” and “Texan,” to fit within the expected parameters of what their audience is looking for in their song selection journeys. They intend to complicate the code soon, attempting a decision tree similar to Akinator for users to comb through to receive their perfect song.

Moving forward, they will continue to write feedback and marketing strategy reports for their Digital Innovations Capstone course and collaborate with professor Christian McDonald to be held accountable for their work and progress. They will continue to prepare for their final demonstration of the completed mobile application on May 6th.

February 18, 2022

Finding specialty music on Spotify with under 250,00 monthly listeners is harder than it seems. That is only one of a set of rules for playable music instilled by KVRX, a student-run radio station based in Austin, Texas.  The disc jockeys working at the station have a difficult time following these perimeters, which we intend to solve with an app that generates non-blacklisted music to play on air. 

Lainie Dickey, third year Radio-Television-Film and Journalism double major and veteran disc jockey at KVRX, has noticed a lack of resources allocated towards DJs who have not had experience in finding music that fits within the blacklist parameters set by the station. Collaborating with fourth year Journalism major Madison Nosek, the two of them have come together to solve this issue by creating an application that can be used by not only DJs at KVRX, but any Spotify user who wishes to find underground music.

Specifically at KVRX, new DJs are required to play “freeform” shows. This means disc jockeys must call attention to at least five different genres, five artists from the station-provided “new bin,” and two Texas artists within their one hour on-air time slot. Per our research, a majority of student-run radio stations in the United States are also required to adhere to certain rules, since these institutions are regulated by the Federal Communications Commission. For people just entering the radio space, these mandatory requirements can feel more like barriers; Lainie and Madison intend to free students from their worries of encroaching on FCC directives.

To accomplish this mission, Madison and Lainie will use RStudio to generate code in R, tapping into the publicly available Spotify API to enforce restrictions set by the radio station to create a database of music that could be played on air. After successfully completing this, we will create a new RNotebook to focus on using the Shiny extension for R to

At the end of Week 1, they have created a detailed Trello board that outlines what is necessary to complete the project within 3 months’ time as well as the first draft of their product board. An intended representative audience and potential competitors in the market have been identified.

Moving forward, they will complete a formal pitch for their Digital Innovations Capstone and continue collaborating with multiple University of Texas at Austin professors, such as Josephine Lukito and Christian McDonald, to ensure that efficient progress is being made towards their final product.