What are the core principles of what Awaves does?
‘Music has a major impact on the success of a party. If the music is off, the entire vibe will be off. What tends to happen is a mismatch: party-goers don’t feel that they have a say in the music that’s being played, while the host of the party is under a lot of stress to find the best songs or playlists to keep the crowd entertained. That’s why our goal with our app Awaves Play is to provide democracy at parties, to give power to party-goers and have songs at a party that everyone likes – not only a select part of the crowd.’
How does the app work then?
‘It’s a web-based application, to keep it as light as possible. Every party using Awaves Play will have its own QR code that people can scan. Using a voting system, they can collectively decide to either increase or decrease the intensity of the music. And there’s a bonus feature, to request a singalong song. So it’s very different from a Spotify playlist where people can add or remove songs to a queue. We’re not even trying to be a direct competitor of Spotify, since we narrowed our focus solely to student house parties. And people can only see the song that is currently playing, not the songs that are lined up. The artificial intelligence within the app will take care of the rest.’
Why did you choose the Kick-In as the right moment to launch this app?
‘Since we were able to start the company here at the UT, this is an opportunity to give back to the local community. That’s also one of the reasons the app is exclusively available for Kick-In participants – for now then. Since a lot of student house parties will take place during the Kick-In, we obviously hope a lot of people will try Awaves Play. At the same time, we have the objective to gauge how users respond to our app. This is a first for us, so that does bring some tension with it. But this is an ideal opportunity to get feedback from our direct target audience.’
So this is the ultimate test, sink or swim?
‘We don’t expect it to be perfect right away. But we want to learn a lot from this launch, about what our target audience expects and requires from this app. At the Kick-In, we have the opportunity to get feedback from a very concise audience.’
And after this, what’s next for Awaves?
‘Over the summer, we’ve secured an angel investment and the team has expanded from four to ten people in the meantime. So you could say we have the wind in our sails at the moment. Once the Kick-In is behind us and we’ve implemented feedback from the users, we want to get Awaves out of exclusivity. There are already plans to expand to other student cities in the Netherlands. Maybe we can start up collaborations with world-famous DJ’s. But I don’t know what’s next for Awaves. Our vision is to take over the world of house parties, and we are constantly evolving to adapt to the users and achieve this goal. We would like to follow in the footsteps of the famous Dutch DJs and be the next wave of DJ innovation to go around the world.’
