Founded this year by Bilal Soomro, Gideon de Brouwer and Ian Bartonjo, Kenya’s RequestBox is a modern day song request platform or Juke Box allowing any person, radio station, club or party to open a RequestBox to receive song requests.
According to Ian Bartonjo, one of the co-founders, the idea came about after he realised the hardship of hosting a party and not having an effective way of handling song requests. After looking at existing applications that tried to tackle this issue, he saw that there wasn’t one that did a good enough job of it.
The application works simply. A user creates a RequestBox using several available options. Then friends and guests can then enter the box and drop in their song requests. With the help of Spotify song suggestions. The request is then displayed among all the requests in the box and sorted by the hot/new filter.
Friends and guests can then upvote or downvote each other’s requests allowing the host to get a good idea on what’s hot to play.
”Our app also allows the host to create a Spotify playlist for his box. Using the requests in the box, the host can directly add select requests into the Spotify playlist,” Ian says. ”Just like that, the host can easily manage and play those requests using RequestBox and Spotify.”
Other notable features include nearby box discovery & social network elements. These allow users to see the activity of their friends and people they follow as well as search for open boxes when at an event. .
Though at the moment the platform is free, Ian says they aim to introduce premium features for heavy users and expanding the brand for use in radio and public events.
