Build your own Wavlake chart
We're excited to announce the release today of custom, embeddable Wavlake charts. This new extension of our portable player allows anyone to slice and dice Wavlake stats to create unique views into our music library. Below is an example we built using this tool – the top 10 Hip-Hop/Rap tracks over the last 21 days:
This is a dynamic chart, so it will automatically update over time. In a few days, weeks, or months, it should look completely different than it does today.
As I've written before, the Wavlake Top 40 was always intended to be a showcase of what's possible with music on Lightning. In other words: just a first step. These custom charts are an evolution of that idea – a basic tool for anyone to build their own version of what's "popular" on Wavlake and post that anywhere.
For the music nerds out there, we can also use custom charts to snapshot a moment in history. For instance, these are the top 10 tracks on Wavlake for the month of January 2023, when we first launched:
This chart will never change because its stats are fixed to a specific window of time. It's mostly helpful for viewing historical data, and might be interesting for people like me who used to cut the Billboard music chart out of the weekend newspaper to collect in a binder (totally true story). Now someone could make the digital equivalent of the pages of that binder.
We've seen other great Lightning music charts pop up in the last few months with their own views on this new network of music (Fountain and RSS Blue, to name a couple). These alternate takes on what is popular show how powerful this technology can be for creating new ways to recommend and discover music.
We're planning to add more options to customize these charts in the future with your feedback. For now, we're eager to see what you all build.
How to get started
(if you want to dive straight into examples, jump to the bottom of this section)
Right now, we allow you to filter on the following attributes:
- number of days or start/end dates (maximum limit of 90 days total)
- genre
Creating a chart is as simple as modifying a few query parameters in the URL of the player, which can then be embedded in an iframe. The base URL of the player is embed.wavlake.com/chart. The params you can use are: days, startDate, endDate, limit, and genre.
We also have the sort param but the only value we have enabled is sats for now. This param is optional, but setting it will display sats earned on tracks instead of a track's duration.
To count all earnings for a set number of days up until today, use the days param and pass in a number (the limit is 90). If using startDate and endDate, the dates must be formatted as YYYY-MM-DD and the maximum time window also is 90 days.
The limit param takes a number and restricts the total number of results. Maximum is 100.
genre is a string, and can be one of any of our top-level genres.
To illustrate, here is the HTML for the two charts shown in the first section of this post:
Top 10 Hip-Hop/Rap tracks for the last 21 days:
<iframe src=https://embed.wavlake.com/chart?days=21&limit=10&genre=hip-hop width="100%" height="380" frameBorder="0" ></iframe>
Top 10 tracks for the month of January 2023:
<iframe src=https://embed.wavlake.com/chart?startDate=2023-01-01&endDate=2023-01-31&limit=10 width="100%" height="380" frameBorder="0" ></iframe>
If you have any questions or feedback, please let us know. Have fun building!