Csorts

Purpose

FoCoMX (Fort Collins Music Exchange) is a local music festival. The existing artist discovery experience was buried in spreadsheets and social media posts. Csorts puts every artist front and center on a web app where festival-goers can browse the lineup, preview tracks from those on Spotify, and decide who to see — before they arrive.

Stack

What I Learned

• The Spotify embed/preview integration lets visitors listen to an artist's top tracks without leaving the site. No Spotify account required for 30-second previews. This transforms a static lineup page into an interactive discovery tool — visitors go from "I have never heard of this band" to "I need to see them live" in 30 seconds.
• Festival lineup websites are almost universally terrible: a poster image with 200 names in decreasing font sizes, a PDF schedule, maybe an Instagram grid. The bar is so low that a simple web app with artist cards, genre tags, Spotify previews, and set times feels revolutionary. This is a gap begging to be filled.
• Speed of delivery was the feature. FoCoMX 2026 needed something before the festival, not a perfect product six months later. Spinning it up quickly meant: no custom CMS, no user accounts, no ticketing integration. Just: artist data (name, genre, photo, Spotify link, set time) rendered as browsable cards with embedded previews. The scope was locked to what could ship in time.
• Artist data entry was the bottleneck — collecting names, photos, genres, Spotify links, and set times for dozens of artists. This is the exact kind of data wrangling that AI can accelerate: given a lineup poster or spreadsheet, an agent can search Spotify for each artist, pull their top track, grab their photo, and output structured JSON ready for the site.

Key Insights

• The runbook for csorts — "take a festival lineup, build a browsable web app with Spotify previews" — is a productizable template. Every music festival (and there are thousands) has the same problem: they have a lineup and no good way to help attendees discover unfamiliar artists. A white-label version of csorts, configurable per festival, is a legitimate SaaS opportunity. The value proposition is clear: turn your lineup from a poster into an experience.
• This project connects to the Crew Queue / 2Dueces music thread and the La Fleur mockup strategy. Like La Fleur — building something for someone else unsolicited — csorts was built quickly for a real need. The difference: csorts was for a real event with a real deadline, which forced the kind of ruthless scoping that side projects never have. Deadlines produce shipped products.
• Fort Collins as the local community ties csorts to the physical world in a way most projects in this blog do not. brettowers.com says "Fort Collins, Colorado" in the JSON-LD. Csorts serves a Fort Collins festival. The local connection reinforces the personal brand SEO: Brett Owers is not just a developer on the internet — he is a developer in Fort Collins who builds things for his community.
• For the Potatuhs ecosystem, csorts demonstrates a capability that other local businesses and events would pay for: "we built the FoCoMX artist discovery site, we can build yours." The project is a portfolio piece, a community contribution, and a proof of concept for festival tooling — all from one quick build.