technology
Poetify: AI Music Covers as a Birthday Gift
December 24, 2025
What do you get someone who has everything? You build them a music streaming service.
Nikita Matveev’s birthday was coming up. If you’ve been to Hong Kong’s bar scene, you know the name. He ran The Old Man, which was ranked #1 Best Bar in Asia (2019) and #9 in the World’s 50 Best Bars. Then he opened Dead Poets in Central, which turned Sauce Barbershop into a cocktail bar after dark. The man doesn’t do boring, so a bottle of whiskey wasn’t going to cut it.
I wanted something that couldn’t be bought, couldn’t be unwrapped, and would make him laugh every time he opened it. The idea was simple and stupid in the best possible way: what if dead legends covered songs they’d never heard?
The concept
Poetify is a full Spotify clone. Not a mockup. Not a landing page. A working web app with a sidebar, playlists, search, album pages, artist pages, a player bar at the bottom, and actual playable audio. Seven albums. 19 original AI-generated cover songs. All wrapped in custom cover art.
POETIFY x Nirvana
Kurt Cobain’s voice covering XXXTENTACION’s “Moonlight” and “Revenge.” Also covering Грибы’s “Интро” because why not mix grunge with Ukrainian hip-hop.
POETIFY x MF DOOM
The villain rapping over Jimi Hendrix, Joan Jett, Backstreet Boys, The Doors, and System of a Down. DOOM doing “I Want It That Way” is something I didn’t know I needed.
POETIFY x Janis Joplin
Janis covering Ol’ Dirty Bastard’s “Shimmy Shimmy Ya” and MF DOOM’s “Rapp Snitch Knishes.” Also singing Ленинград’s “День Рождения” because it’s a birthday gift.
The rest of the catalogue
Four more albums complete the seven-album set. Each one is its own collision of eras, genres, and cultures.
How it works
AI voice models trained on public recordings generate the vocal covers. The tracks are mixed over the original instrumentals. Cover art is AI-generated to match each artist’s aesthetic. The whole thing runs as a static Next.js app on Cloudflare.
The Spotify UI clone is pixel-accurate: the green accent, the sidebar library, the playback controls, the album grid layout, the “Recently played” section. Even the profile avatar shows Nikita’s face.
Why it matters (beyond the joke)
This took two days to build. The music generation, the cover art, the UI, the deployment. Two days. Not two months. Not a team. One person with AI tools.
That’s the point. The gift isn’t the app. The gift is the proof that you can build genuinely creative, genuinely personal things at a speed that would’ve been impossible two years ago. A custom streaming service with original music, built for an audience of one.
It’s still live: poetify.egor.lol
Happy birthday, Nikita. The bar is still open. The music is still playing.
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