AItunes Reviews — album review website

Review site for AItunes Reviews, the AI music critic (Pitchfork-style). The editors publish reviews from a password-protected admin panel; visitors browse the archive, the review pages and the rankings. The design matches the AItunes Reviews share cards: white page, bold italic serif titles, scores in black outlined circles and the blue logo.

Built with Next.js 16 (App Router, Cache Components), Tailwind CSS 4, Drizzle ORM and SQLite/libSQL.

Features

Public site

• Home: latest reviews, highest rated albums & EPs, "Essential" picks, top songs and top artists.
• Reviews archive (/reviews): search by title or artist, filter by type (album / EP / single), genre and minimum score, sort by newest, oldest, highest, lowest, title or artist.
• Review page (/reviews/[slug]): laid out like the share card — title, artist, year, genres, cover and a big score circle (0–10, one decimal) on the left; "Track Scores" with a score per track on the right; "Listen on" buttons for the streaming links; the written review below. Standout tracks get a ★.
• Rankings (/rankings): highest rated albums & EPs (filterable to albums or EPs only), highest rated songs across all album tracks, EP tracks and singles, and artists by average score. Tied scores share a rank. A single with no rated track counts as one song carrying the review score. The same song (same artist + title, ignoring case and quote style) on several releases — single, album, deluxe — appears once: listed under the album/EP, using the rating from the most recently reviewed release, with "also on …" links to the other releases.
• Artists (/artists): leaderboard sorted by average score, review count, name or most recently reviewed. Each artist has a page showing their average, every reviewed release and a ranking of all their rated songs.
• About page with the scoring guide.
• RSS feed (/rss.xml), sitemap.xml, robots.txt, Open Graph tags and schema.org Review JSON-LD on every review. These help with search engines, link previews and an AOTY submission.

Admin panel (/admin)

• One shared password (ADMIN_PASSWORD). No accounts or email.
• Create, edit and delete reviews: title, artist, type, release date, cover URL, genres (with one-click suggestions from earlier reviews), streaming links (paste one per line; Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube, SoundCloud, Deezer, TIDAL, Amazon Music, Bandcamp and Suno are recognised automatically), score, summary, full text, byline, publish date and an "Essential" flag.
• Tracklist editor: add, remove and reorder tracks, rate each one, mark standouts, or paste a whole tracklist at once.
• Quick fill from Apple Music: search a release to fill in the title, artist, cover, release date, genre, Apple Music link and tracklist automatically. It uses the public iTunes Search API, so no API key is needed.
• A review's link never changes after publishing, even if you edit the title.
• Share image: every review has a ready-to-post image (1600×900 PNG) in the style of the AItunes post cards — title, artist, year, cover, big score, track scores and the logo. Download it with the "Image ↓" button in the admin list (or open /reviews/<slug>/image). It is also used as the link preview when a review is shared on X.

Run locally

npm install
cp .env.example .env.local   # then set ADMIN_PASSWORD
npm run seed                 # optional: 6 made-up demo reviews
npm run dev                  # http://localhost:3000, admin at /admin

npm run seed -- --reset deletes all reviews and re-inserts the demo data. If the server is running, restart it afterwards: pages are cached and are only refreshed automatically when changes come through the admin panel.

Deploy (free)

1. Create a free database on Turso and get its URL and an auth token.
2. Import the repo on Vercel and set these environment variables: ADMIN_PASSWORD, DATABASE_URL (libsql://…), DATABASE_AUTH_TOKEN, NEXT_PUBLIC_SITE_URL.
3. Deploy. The database tables (and any columns added in later versions) are created automatically on first use.

No custom domain is needed: the site runs on the free Vercel address. On Vercel the site detects its own production address automatically; set NEXT_PUBLIC_SITE_URL only to override it.

Project layout

src/app/            pages (public + /admin) and route handlers (rss, api/itunes)
src/components/     UI pieces (album blocks, score badge and bar, ranking lists, filter form, admin form)
src/lib/db/         Drizzle schema + client (tables auto-created)
src/lib/queries.ts  cached public queries and sorting/filtering helpers
src/lib/auth.ts     password check + signed session cookie
src/lib/site.ts     site name, tagline, social links
src/assets/         logo images and fonts for the share image
src/lib/share-image.tsx  share image layout (next/og)
scripts/seed.ts     demo data

Decided

• Only the AItunes editors publish reviews and scores; visitors can only read them.

• All editors share one admin password. There are no per-editor accounts or profile pages; the optional byline field on each review is enough.

• Scores are out of 10 with one decimal (track ratings too).

• Each review has genres and streaming-platform links.

• No custom domain; the free .vercel.app address is used.

• Design follows the AItunes Reviews share cards (Pitchfork-style).

• Covers come from Apple Music import or a pasted image link; no file upload needed.

• The official logo is used in the header, footer, favicon and share image (src/assets, src/app/icon.png, src/app/opengraph-image.png).

Open questions for the client

• About page text (the current copy is a placeholder).