Last Year's > This Year's – 2018 Firefly Music Festival Review

The app itself is pretty much the same from last year, all of the helpful and awesome things (scheduling your lineup, artist info, maps, etc) still work flawlessly, but I must say that the biggest success from last year's iteration of the app is this version's greatest downfall. I am talking about the Firefly Radio, if you can even call it that. Last year, the radio was provided by Slingo and played tons and tons of different songs from all of the different artists. This year however, it is provided by SoundCloud. Not only is it NOT a radio station in the similar vein as a Pandora, Spotify, or Slingo produced product, but this "radio" isn't anything more than about a 100 song playlist. The greatest part about the radio from last year was that I got a chance to hear some of the lesser known artists which helped me to make decisions on who I wanted to see during the festival. It was also really refreshing to hear songs I wasn't exactly familiar with. It made it feel very much like a good quality radio station. This year is exponentially worse as far as quality. The "radio" only has a couple of songs at most of any given artist and since the playlist is shorter than the lineup, there have to be some artists completely omitted. You have no optional features to randomize the playlist (you can view the playlist in its entirety though through navigating the list icon on the right). As a consequence you are forced to listen to the same songs in the same order over and over again. Overall, the people over at Firefly, Red Frog, and Aloompa really dropped the ball with the app this year. What was an amazingly useful tool that allowed even non festival goers to enjoy the sounds and songs of the festival was disregarded for reasons unknown. The UI didn't have to change at all, the only things that needed to be done was update the lineup and schedule AS IT WAS RELEASED and to actually provide a RADIO STATION instead of some shallow playlist one of your interns created one night after they had a couple of drinks.
Review by Jason Nico on 2018 Firefly Music Festival.