How a catchy Sierra Leonean song, a literal dream, and a Friday turned into building a cultural companion app for Salone music. This blog covers the background story, the build decisions, and some notes on the app. Feel free to jump to individual sections if desired.
It Started With a Song
🎵away, away, away 🎵
In the summer of 2024, I was listening to a catchy tune that YouTube Music (hereafter referred to as YTM) had played for me and that I “liked”. Song title is “One Life” by a Sierra Leonean (aka Salone) singer named “Famous”. I sang along whenever the word ‘away’ came up.
🎵… me peace away, away, me joy away, away, me smile away🎵
“Was he saying he wouldn’t let anyone take away his peace, his joy, his smile?” Yes, he was! I tried to understand the rest of the song. Not only did I love the tune, I loved the message, even though I could only understand part of it.
Since then, maybe because I’ve played the song a few hundred times and watched the video at least a hundred times, YTM has been recommending more songs by Salone artists.
I love music from all over the world, including music from Africa. When I listen to Afropop songs from most other countries (like Nigeria, Ghana, and a few others), I either understand enough or understand nothing. At some point, I noticed that YTM would show the lyrics on some Afropop songs. It never did on the Salone songs though. Telling myself to “just listen” didn’t work, my curiosity kept increasing. I would ask a friend from Sierra Leone for the meaning of titles or phrases, leading to fun chats between us. I would Google phrases and meanings, and eventually started asking Gemini directly. This has been a fun musical rabbit hole. I now have a list of artists. I'd heard that Salone artists sometimes perform in DC, so I'd been asking around for concert news. That friend connected me with a local promoter, who quickly realized just how hooked I was.
Dreamt about building an app???
Fast-forward to April 2026, I had a dream. While asleep. I dreamt that I built an app to help with my fun addiction to Salone music. Go ahead and laugh, it’s ok. A few days later, after I had asked Gemini for yet another translation, I told it about the dream. Gemini basically said to build it and laid out why it would be more valuable than chatbot windows. Gemini offered to work together on it, but I switched to Claude’s chatbot - I personally like Claude as a thought partner and had used it for a few other projects.
Building this would be fun even if I was the only one who used it. And in talking to the promoter, I had ideas for how it might help him too.
The Build
Claude's chatbot and I started with the Gemini transcript and worked through features, priorities, and limitations. One early reality check: there was no clean API for Salone music events, which shaped how I approached the concerts feature.
I say often to pick the right tool for the job, so I held off on choosing a vibe coding tool until I knew what I was building.
Claude recommended either Lovable or Replit with reasoning and tradeoffs. Part of my goals are to gain experience across multiple tools. I had kept building Study Buddy on Lovable for over a month. I hadn't used Replit since WinCraft in February, so it was a natural choice for the variety.
I upgraded to Replit’s paid plan (Core), I knew I’d run out of credits quickly on the free plan. I got to building, and building, and building, while listening to a playlist that included a lot of Salone music. I ran out of monthly credits in under 8 hours, bought more, and kept building.
What I had that first day could be demo'd but multiple changes were needed before a not-embarrassing beta could be released and announced, which would be days later.
Most of it was fun. Some parts weren't but were instructive. For example, getting the AI to reliably generate accurate artist bios. And losing the artist data led me to add a feature for admins to bulk add artists. Famous was a good test case because with that stage name, I had to add ways to ensure he was found and that helped with other artists.
My MacBook Air has crashed multiple times in the process. Not fun, but the work was never lost.
About the App
The initial version of the app is at techbees.me/salone-vibes. It’s in beta until it says it’s not. I’ll talk through some decisions and notes.
Why Build an App?: I was already using chatbots. Chatbot answers are ephemeral (meaning buried in history, not searchable, not cumulative). An app saves that context over time and integrates things like events, artist exploration, and other features that a chatbot could not provide.
Web app, mobile-first: I chose a web app over a native mobile app (one you'd download from an app store) because it works across desktop, tablet, and mobile. I also designed it mobile-first since that's where I'm usually listening to music and wanting to look something up.
Salone-specific: I did wonder if I should expand the app to be pan-African and not just Salone music. I decided, with Claude’s input, to keep it Salone-specific because:
Krio is a creole language distinct from Nigerian Pidgin, Ghanaian Pidgin, etc.
Nigerian Afrobeats already has Genius, YTM lyrics, and broader platform support
Salone music is genuinely underserved; being specific is a feature, not a limitation
Event submissions are manual: Submissions use a form, including the ability to recognize a flyer image for ease. I really, really (did I mention really) want a fully automated version. Alas, scraping violates terms of service, and searches aren't always reliable. I constantly asked Gemini about upcoming concerts and it missed ones I knew existed. Salone events seem to live on socials like Instagram and Facebook, not event sites like Ticketmaster, so there's no clean API to pull from. For now, the form is the honest solution, and promoters can add their events directly.
App Name: “Get am nice” is a phrase that comes up in multiple songs and it makes me smile. Not everyone would recognize that, so I wanted something that would describe the app. Using “get am nice” as the temporary name kept me happy while building. Replit named the project “Salone Vibes” which I also love, and that became the official name.
By the way, this is part of what the app showed me on looking up “get am nice”. Try it yourself, you can even without an account.
(Note: Remember that AI is non-deterministic so you might not get this exact text.)
Under The Hood (for the curious)
Salone Vibes is vibe coded with React and Node.js on the frontend and backend, PostgreSQL for the database, and Clerk for authentication. The AI features use the Claude API for the Salone Lookup, artist bio generation, and flyer extraction. Artist bios are grounded with Tavily web search before Claude writes the copy, which helps with accuracy on lesser-known artists. The initial build was in Replit; ongoing development is in Cursor. Hosting is on Railway.
Closing
What's next? Oh, I have plans for this app, you'll see changes in the upcoming days/weeks.
For reasons, I've moved from Replit to Cursor to continue coding, and Replit gave me a nice migration guide and Claude and Cursor expanded on it - that's a story in itself.
All apps, repos, and posts from this series are at techbees.me/blog/building-out-loud-ai and my LinkedIn is at linkedin.com/in/odumade.
Go on and "get am nice". And if you're in the DC area on May 24, there will be Salone concerts with multiple singers including Famous, and of course, it's in the app!
