Luaka Bop Digital Music Platform

LuakaBop is the official homepage of Luaka Bop, a New York-based independent record label that focuses on discovering and curating distinctive global music. It releases both contemporary artists and carefully selected reissues that often sit outside mainstream commercial trends. The label is known for blending cultural storytelling, strong visual identity, and thoughtful music curation. Rather than targeting mass-market audiences, it serves listeners who value originality, depth, and musical exploration. At its core, Luaka Bop acts as a bridge between overlooked musical histories and modern global audiences.

Next.js, Sanity, Tailwind CSS, Shadcn UI, Supabase, Stripe

The label's legacy site was slow, difficult to update, and tightly coupled to backend logic. Editorial teams relied on engineers for simple content changes, and media-heavy pages were hurting performance and SEO.

Redesign the platform with a scalable architecture that separates content from presentation, improves core web vitals, and supports long-term growth (artists, releases, campaigns and commerce).

I led the end-to-end migration to a Next.js (App Router) architecture backed by Sanity CMS, decoupling content from presentation and modernizing the platform for long-term scalability.

I architected normalized, relational content modals for artists, albums, and tracks, implementing clear referencing patters, draft/version strategies, and future-proof schema extensibility.

I designed and executed a hybrid rendering strategy to optimize performance while maintaining near real-time content freshness.

I built a scalable, reusable component system using Tailwind CSS and shadcn UI, formalizing design tokens, enforcing consistence and reducing UI-level technical debt.

Engineered a media optimization pipeline leveraging CDN transformations, responsive image strategies, and controlled audio preview streaming to minimize bandwidth and improve core web vitals.

I implemented secure preview environments and webhook-driven revalidation workflows, significantly improving editorial velocity and release agility.

I established performance budgets within CI, proactively monitoring Lighthouse and Web Vitals to prevent regressions before production deployment.

Elevated Lighthouse performance scores form ~60 to consistently 90+, significantly improving load time, SEO visibility, and user engagement metrics.

Empowered non-technical teams with structured, self-serve publishing capabilities, reducing engineering bottlenecks and increasing operational efficiency.

Reduced content deployment turnaround from days to minutes by streamlining preview, validation and release workflows.

Delivered a production-grade, scalable architecture capable of sustaining high-traffic release campaigns without degradation in performance or reliability.