Builder Talk
Search by feels: how Beats in Space made 27 years of radio mixes discoverable
Hybrid search native to Sanity, rebuilt for a 40,000-track archive, plus the workflow that cut publishing time from half a day to under 20 minutes.
- When
- November 10, 9:00 – 9:30 AM PST
- Where
- Streaming online ✳ Register now
- Who
John Siciliano
Senior Technical Product Marketing Manager
Sanity
Jon Rivera
Founder
Websessions.co
Search “cosmic disco” in the Beats in Space archive and you’ll find mixes that never use those words. Behind it are more than 1,200 mixes, 40,000 tracks, and 16,000 DJ pages, all run by Tim Sweeney, who started hosting the show as a student at NYU in 1999.
Websessions moved the site and archive to Sanity and built a native hybrid search on top of it. It matches exact words first, then falls back to meaning, using embeddings stored in the dataset rather than a separate vector database. Underneath, mixes, tracks, artists, and labels are modeled as connected documents. They also rebuilt the weekly workflow in the Studio, from track-list import to newsletter send.
What you’ll learn
- Hybrid search in one GROQ query: keyword ranking first, then a semantic fallback, using embeddings built into the dataset
- One-paste track list import: a custom Studio input that creates artist, track, and label records in bulk
- Genre tagging with a threshold: embeddings tag confident matches, and Gemini handles the rest
- Publishing once to every channel: updates the site and related mixes, and drafts the newsletter
If you manage a large back catalog with a small team, this session is for you.
- A full weekly publish, from track list to newsletter
- The search query behind beatsinspace.net
- [Live chat Q&A / Recording sent to all registrants]
