Inside Shopify Hack Days: Building a prototype for music-playing pages

Shopify runs Hack Days roughly twice a year. It’s two, sometimes three days where every employee pauses their regular work, picks a problem that fascinates them, and builds something with Shopifolk they don’t normally work with. We’re pretty sure it’s the world's largest hackathon with multiple thousand participants, and it's been part of the company culture since the earliest days. Some Hack Days projects ship, some don't, but the point isn't the output, it's the culture of experimentation that it sustains. Picking up unfamiliar tools, exploring novel ideas, and seeing what happens when you give folks room to follow their curiosity. Here’s one project built during a recent hackathon. For Hack Days 39, our team of 13 set out to explore a particular problem. Musicians love Shopify for merch. T-shirts, vinyl, posters, the physical stuff works great. But when it comes to selling the actual music, artists default to other platforms. Why? Because a Shopify product page for a digital album is generally an image and a buy button. There's no built-in way to hear the music. This isn't a small problem. Products categorized as Music &…