I also tried to develop with Truffle but after a few hours I decided to avoid it and really start learning all the internals without a framework. To this day I haven't had the need to use Truffle at all to develop the majority of my projects.
Most of Digital Ocean droplets have their IP blocked. I spent several hours last week configuring a mail server only to find out my email were being rejected from hotmail and godaddy.
Good job. I built something similar a year ago. Is based on Backbone as well with the difference that you can search by genre and for karaoke results http://440.fm