The Challenge
The challenge: build and sustain a free music streaming platform able to compete with international services without the infrastructure of a large corporation. The site had to serve real-time audio to millions of users, maintain an extensive catalog organized by genres and artists, and operate reliably for years with a small team. Additionally, the advertising-based business model demanded optimal performance to avoid losing users to latency or downtime.
The Solution
The solution: I built a lightweight architecture on PHP and MySQL, with a frontend in HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript. I implemented aggressive caching and CDN delivery to reduce latency and server load. The system included a catalog organized by music genres, an alphabetical artist directory, and an internal track search. The central player generated automatic playlists that improved user retention. The platform operated on an advertising model for sustainability, without requiring registration or downloads.