Media & Entertainment

Heavy Metal Fan Platform

RiotFM

Timeline

3 mo

Team

Launch

Q2 2025

RiotFM — live radio, events, and merch store screens

24/7

Live Metal Radio

1K+

Concurrent Listeners

Core Modules

Platforms (iOS & Android)

Overview

The Challenge

Heavy metal fans are underserved by mainstream streaming and discovery platforms. Genre radio gets buried, event listings are scattered across multiple ticketing sites, merch lives on individual band websites, and community news is split across Reddit and Discord. A dedicated fan has no single destination that feels genuinely built for the culture.

RiotFM was conceived as that destination — a unified platform bridging fans, artists, and brands in the metal scene. The brief called for 24/7 live radio with a DJ dashboard, an events map with ticketing, a merch store with limited-drop support, and a community news feed — all wrapped in an immersive dark aesthetic that feels native to the genre.

Solution

What We Built

A Flutter app built by three developers in three months, shipping natively on iOS and Android from a single codebase. Four distinct modules — Radio, Events, Merch, and News — live under one unified navigation shell, each with its own backend integration but sharing Firebase as the data and auth layer.

Live audio streams at 128–192 kbps via Icecast hosted on AWS EC2, built to handle 1,000 concurrent listeners with room to scale. The DJ dashboard lets show hosts manage schedules and playlists without touching the app code. Stripe powers the merch store checkout, and Firebase Cloud Messaging delivers push notifications for breaking news and new drops.

Tech Stack

FlutterDartFirebaseIcecastAWS EC2Stripe

Key Features

What makes it work

Live Radio

24/7 metal radio at 128–192 kbps via Icecast on AWS EC2. Now playing, on-rotation playlist, equaliser visualiser, and stream quality display — all updated live. Scales to 1,000 concurrent listeners.

DJ Dashboard

Show hosts schedule broadcasts, manage playlists, and update on-rotation tracks from a dedicated admin interface — without any code changes. Listeners see updates in real time.

Event Discovery

Metal gigs, festivals, and tours surfaced on a map with location-based filtering. Event pages include full lineup, venue details, and direct ticket purchase links — with sold-out status shown in real time.

Merch Store (The Vault)

Integrated e-commerce with swipeable product galleries, size selection, and Stripe checkout. Supports limited-edition drops and pre-orders with countdown timers and early-access notifications.

News & Updates Feed

Admin-controlled CMS publishes metal news, interviews, new releases, and community posts. Push notifications via Firebase Cloud Messaging alert subscribers to breaking content the moment it goes live.

Onboarding & Personalisation

Immersive branded intro on first launch, followed by quick-start genre and band preferences. The feed, event recommendations, and radio highlights adapt to each user's taste from day one.

Live Audio Infrastructure

Built for metal, scaled for volume

Radio is the heartbeat of RiotFM. The audio layer runs on Icecast — battle-tested streaming media software — hosted on AWS EC2 with capacity for 1,000 concurrent listeners and room to scale beyond that as the audience grows.

The Flutter audio player runs as a persistent background service — listeners keep the stream going while browsing events or shopping the merch store. Lock-screen controls and notification player work natively on both iOS and Android.

Icecast on AWS EC2

Open-source streaming server delivering audio at 128–192 kbps — proven infrastructure used by thousands of internet radio stations globally

Scalable to 1,000+ listeners

EC2 instance sizing and Icecast relay configuration supports concurrent listener spikes without buffering or dropped connections

Background audio playback

Flutter audio service runs persistently in the background — lock-screen controls and Android notification player work out of the box on both platforms

DJ scheduling dashboard

Hosts manage show schedules and on-rotation playlists via the admin panel — listeners see "Now Broadcasting" and "On Rotation" update live