We won 2 prizes again at The Next Web Hack Battle. This time with “Bring Your Own Music”: personalized Spotify Music Cards using NFC and RFID. We used a network-connected Arduino coupled with an NFC Reader, a custom Spotify App, the Spotify API, a PHP front-end and Apigee for the data back-end.

Using Bring Your Own Music, you can use random RFID chip cards, including the one-time-use Public Transport ones, and configure them to contain their favorite Spotify Playlists. Then arriving at a party, you put this card on the scanner for a few seconds (NFC Reader) and wham! Your songs are added to the party’s Spotify Playlist! The more a song is added, the more it is ‘voted up’ in the list. This is the innovative way of bringing your own music!

Since you can program any card that has an RFID chip to contain your music, including the ones that you normally throw away like the one-time Public Transport cards in Amsterdam, you can also exchange your favorite Spotify Playlists with friends, for example.