Ankrd in Music

(Photo by Jonathon Schoenheider)

As students, music is essential to our rhythm of life, from mornings of singing in the shower to late nights of finishing homework with earbuds in to keep the rest of the world out. There really isn’t a good day that passes by without some music to accompany it.

With music so readily available in our world today, thanks to programs like Spotify and Pandora that supply playlists that other Americans believe to be the best, it’s no surprise that Hope College student, Jonathan Schoenheider (’19), was inspired by his love for music to create a website that paired well with his passion and curiosity. Schoenheider’s website, “Ankrd”, is designed “to deliver a new kind of interactive community based on a single subject: music.” His design is geared towards what people at Hope are listening to and what they think about the music they share. “Ankrd” is a “source and resource for Hope College students to gather and discuss musical tastes,” such as their favorite artist or song that doesn’t necessarily make Billboard’s “Hot 100”.

By the end of his senior year of high school, Schoenheider was already thinking about his idea for “Ankrd,” but he officially launched his project this past November. His journey brought him to study Communication at Hope, where he is pursuing the music community by participating in Hope’s radio show, WTHS 89.9, where his love for music, and the people who listen to it, could interact. However, Schoenheider desires a more intimate relationship between the community and the music they listen to than even Hope’s radio station can offer. As a result, he took a risk and pursued something completely new. After copyrighting the name “Ankrd”, Schoenheider’s personal spin on the spelling of Hope’s beloved symbol, he went to work on a simple and clean-cut website that gave way to greater opportunities for discovering music.

Schoenheider, who has his own unique taste in music (ranging from Van Halen’s “Panama” to “Mine” by Phoebe Ryan), has worked relentlessly on making “Ankrd” into a true compilation of the unique music community that Hope is. Unfortunately, he lacks the crucial foundation of enough people who use his website. We all listen to music and can attest to the fact that music is almost always better when shared with others. It is Schoenheider’s hope that through his website, our community can find commonalities with other members that we ordinarily wouldn’t and that we may all expand from our current ways of finding and thinking about music to a way that defies the norm of what we consider popular music.

Visit www.ankrd.com to begin the discussion and sharing music today!