The morning after Huang published the website, he woke up to dozens of messages and social media tags about Spotify Pie. “I was sort of doing the project as a way to learn it and get more familiar with it.” “I was using a language that I didn’t know too well,” Huang said. Huang shared the website with a few friends once he finished building it, but he didn’t expect the personal project to become an international phenomenon. “At first, it was a monetary success, just from the ads and sponsors … I was really surprised,” Darren Huang said. The two discussed that they would like to see a simple, graphical display of their music listening habits at any time of the year, not just at the year’s end.

The idea, inspired by Spotify’s end-of-year “Spotify Wrapped” feature that shows users a comprehensive summary of all their music listening habits from the past year, sprang from a conversation Huang had with a friend a month ago. Users can also see their most-listened-to artists, indicated by a larger font size. The chart displays a listener’s musical genre preferences from Spotify over the past month, which can be as specific as “modern dream pop” or “bubblegrunge” and shows relevant artists known for their work in the respective genre. After signing into one’s Spotify account and enabling the app’s access to the listening history, a personalized Spotify Pie chart will be generated and a screenshot can be shared with friends or posted on social media. To get one’s Spotify Pie, a user will access the third-party app by clicking on Huang’s website via a smartphone or computer. In just five hours over the span of two days in early June, Huang developed Spotify Pie - a “Bake Your Monthly Genre Pie” web-based app that shows users their favorite music genres and artists in a colorful pie chart. His solution? Creating an app that he never thought would soon take social media by storm.

However, second-year computer science student Darren Huang found himself bored and restless. In the final week of the spring quarter, many UCLA students were stressed, exhausted and highly caffeinated as they prepared for their final exams.

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