Over the holidays I quickly threw together Unstream, a little app to find better platforms for supporting the artists making the music you’re listening to.

What started as a way to solve a personal problem with building a music library has led to a super fun exploration into building an aggregator product. Since v1 I’ve added:

• 2 more indie music platforms into the search results
• Integrating with the MusicBrainz database to capture more artist links
• Scraping artist websites for Patreon, social and other links
• A feature to save artists to support later, and export that list to a markdown file
• Support for ListenBrainz scrobbling (like last.fm but open-source - I’d like to also integrate last.fm soon too!)
• Lots of little refinements to the Mac app and web UI

Claude Opus 4.5 has made it possible to improve on my original idea so much more easily and quickly. Which is great, because announcing last week caused Unstream to get a lot of attention!

• It’s gotten 30 app downloads and 1 paid upgrade
• It blew up in the fediverse with nearly 200 boosts, including from some prominent indie dev & music accounts
• Gotten several feature request from actual users
• Been contacted by the friendly folks at Mirlo, jam.coop and Bandwagon.fm, three of the platforms Unstream supports

I’m about to break 1000 visits to the site, despite no real marketing outside of my initial announcement, which I’ll ramp up once a few more features are in place. I’m excited to see where this thing goes!