I made a edm app. My friends thought it was cool... but didn't really want to use it.

First of all, this is not an ad or a promotional post. I’m just looking for honest feedback from fellow ravers.

I’m a raver from China and have been into electronic music for about 12 years.

The rave scene here is still relatively niche. A funny thing is that Chinese festival lineups often follow nearby markets — if you want to guess who might play in China, just check EDC Korea or Ultra Japan around the same dates. 😂

Earlier this year, after going to many festivals and shows, I started wondering:

Why isn’t there an app where I can track which DJs I’ve seen, which festivals I’ve attended, and get notified when DJs I like are playing nearby?

I’m a software engineer, so I spent about four months building one.

You can see the app feature videos here:

https://ravehub-site.vercel.app/

It includes:

• ⁠Event and festival listings
• ⁠DJ profiles and tour dates
• ⁠Following DJs + nearby show notifications
• ⁠Personal rave history
• ⁠Unreleased IDs / tracklists
• ⁠Genre information
• ⁠Community-submitted events and DJ data
• ⁠......

I also spent a lot of time scraping and connecting data between DJs, events, venues, promoters, genres, etc.

When I showed it to my rave friends, the reaction was basically:

“Wow, this is really cool… but I’m not sure I’d actually use it.”

Launching an app in China also involves quite a lot of registration, compliance, licensing, and cost, so without strong early feedback I decided not to officially release it.

But I still really like the project, so I want to hear opinions from ravers outside China.

My original vision was to build something more community-driven than a traditional event-listing platform.

For example, users could submit underground/local events that are missing, update DJ information, contribute tracklists or IDs, and help maintain the database.

In theory, I really like this idea because even large platforms can’t cover every local scene in the world.

But I’m now realizing that a community product has a serious cold-start problem.

If there aren’t enough users, the event information is incomplete.

If the information is incomplete, new users leave.

If users leave, nobody contributes.

Another thing I realized is that there may actually be several very different types of users.

Some people genuinely love electronic music and follow specific DJs very closely.

For them, the most useful feature might simply be:

Follow a DJ → get notified when they’re playing in your country or city.

Right now this information is spread across Instagram, promoter pages, festival announcements, etc. It’s surprisingly easy to find out that one of your favorite DJs played nearby only after the show already happened.

But another group of people mainly enjoy nightlife itself — drinking, meeting people, partying, clubbing. They may not care much about the DJ, the subgenre, a genre tree, or their personal rave history.

For those people, this app probably doesn’t solve anything important.

And that distinction made me wonder whether I was originally treating “ravers” as one user group when they’re actually several very different groups.

I’m also questioning some of the features I personally find cool.

For example:

Tracking every DJ you’ve seen sounds fun to me — but would people actually keep doing it?

A genre tree is interesting for music nerds — but is it useful enough to open an app for?

A rave social network sounds attractive — but why would people use it instead of Reddit, Discord, Instagram, or WhatsApp?

Tracklists and unreleased IDs are useful — but copyright and video-hosting issues also make that more complicated.

And even if the database is community-maintained, someone still has to review submissions, remove spam, resolve conflicting information, and keep the whole thing alive.

So I’d love to ask:

Would you actually use an app like this?

What would matter most to you?

• ⁠DJ tour notifications?
• ⁠Tracking shows/festivals you’ve attended?
• ⁠Discovering local events?
• ⁠Tracklists / unreleased IDs?
• ⁠Community features?
• ⁠Something else entirely?

And which features sound cool in theory but you’d probably never use?

I’m very open to criticism. I’d rather figure out what ravers actually need than keep building based on my own assumptions.

If anyone is interested in the project or wants to collaborate on launching it somewhere outside China, I’d also be happy to talk.

PLUR ❤️