Streaming platforms sort music by artist. Shazam sorts by recording. Genius sorts by lyrics. The melody, which is the part of a song that actually travels from one country to another, has no place of its own online. “La Mer” becomes “Beyond the Sea.” “Bella Ciao” is sung in many languages. K-pop, Latin pop, and Bollywood cross borders every day. None of it is connected anywhere the public can see.
Sampled Planet
A music discovery platform built around one simple idea. The same song often lives in many languages around the world, and no product has ever put all those versions in one place.
2026
YEAR PUBLLISHED
4
AUDIENCES
30+
X
SONG GROUPS
100+
%
UNIQUE SONGS
STRATEGIC GAPS
Where the real opportunity lived
A MISSING LAYER
How might we build the first product that organizes music by the song itself, across languages?
FAMILIAR MELODIES
How might we turn "this song sounds familiar" into a real discovery moment?
People hear songs that feel familiar all the time. They never find out why. That moment of recognition is a chance for discovery that most music apps throw away. Sampled Planet uses the shared melody as the starting point, and lets the culture and language become the reason to keep listening.
SIGNAL FOR THE INDUSTRY
How might public taste show which versions of a song actually travel?
Labels, publishers, and artists spend real money guessing which version of a song will work in a new country. A simple public vote, open to anyone, can show honest taste across markets in a way no chart does today. Listeners get discovery. The industry gets a signal. Both come from the same simple action.
LOW FRICTION
How might we collect real taste data without asking anyone to sign up?
Music apps win or lose in the first thirty seconds. Every sign-up screen is a cost on curiosity. The goal was to make voting and submitting a song feel as easy as pressing play, while keeping the data strong enough to trust over time.
DESIGN LOGIC
The why behind every decision
ONE SONG, MANY VERSIONS
Made the song the main object, and each language version a child of it
Every screen in the product starts from one simple rule. A song is the parent. Each cultural version sits under it. Every vote, every comparison, every new submission ties back to that same parent. This small structural choice is the whole idea of the product.
It is why the catalogue can grow to thousands of songs without becoming messy. It is why comparing versions feels natural. And it is why Sampled Planet reads as a map of one song in many tongues, and not another music library.
LISTEING AS COMPARISON
Designed the experience so comparing versions feels as easy as scrolling
On mobile, versions stack as vertical cards. Swipe past a French version, and a Japanese version is already playing. The player sits above the rest of the app, so the sound keeps going while the user moves around. On desktop, the same content opens up into a side-by-side view, built for deeper listening.
The interaction matches the concept. You cannot really understand how a song changes across cultures until you hear the versions one after the other. The product makes that simple.
COLOR AS CULTURE
Let each country bring its own color, and kept the rest of the design quiet
Each version card carries a soft gradient tied to its country of origin. No flags, no stock photos, no licensed imagery. A simple, light system that gives every country a clear visual feeling and can grow to any number of cultures without redesign. The rest of the site stays quiet on purpose, so the songs can lead.
This also made the product easier to grow. Adding a new country is a data task, not a design task. The catalogue can move faster than the design system has to.
BUILD CRAFT
Took the product from first idea to live web app, solo, from end to end
The full product was built by one designer. Strategy, data model, user experience, visual system, hosting, and security. Modern AI tools were used to move faster at every step, while every real decision stayed a design decision. The stack is the same kind of stack a modern startup would choose, and the security setup follows the same standards.
The point is simple. A real idea was taken from a blank page to a working product without a traditional engineering team, and with production quality held the whole way.
Impact & Reflections
Sampled Planet says something simple about music. Songs are more connected than the platforms that sell them. The same melody under “Beyond the Sea,” “Volare,” a Bollywood standard, or a Cantopop ballad has always been the shared piece. The industry just never built a home for it. This product is that home.
When the product works, it serves more than one person at once. A listener finds a version of a song they have known all their life, in a language they do not speak. An artist sees which version of their melody really travels. A publisher watches real taste move toward a market they had not looked at yet. A fan submits a version their family used to sing at home. None of these people need an account. They only need the place to exist.
What launch will prove. Because the product is not live to users yet, the early goals are simple. Do people listen to more than one version in a session. Do they vote without being asked to sign up. Do they submit songs from their own culture because they feel the catalogue is theirs too. The product is ready to measure all of this. The bigger idea stays the same whether ten people find it or ten million. The melody is the bridge, and someone finally built the map.