MUMBAI: A new app enables music fans to share details of the songs they are listening to and discover new ones through friends and tastemakers.
The free music discovery app Soundwave released for iPhone and Android gets users to sign up, and then tracks the music they play not only on their smartphone, but also in streaming services like Spotify and Rdio.
People sign up to follow friends and tastemakers, and see their song-plays. Tracks can be played from YouTube and SoundCloud, rated with thumbs-up or thumbs-down, saved as favourites or shared to Facebook, reports said.
Soundwave also provides filters so you can just see what people have been rating or favouriting, stripping out the individual plays. There’s also a ‘Music Map’ feature where you draw a circle on a map to see what people have been playing within its radius.
Developed by an Irish startup, Soundwave’s slick features can be partly credited to the fact that it was developed closely with Apple and Google engineers “who were seeing regular builds of the app from four months before its release, and giving their feedback.”
It has also associated itself with A- listers like actors Stephen Fry and Ashton Kutcher to Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak who have used it during its pre-launch beta test.
“This came from just really wanting to know what songs people were listening to. For the founding team, the way we all used to find music wasn’t by spending hours trawling through websites. It was by asking friends who were more in the know,” chief executive Brendan O’Driscoll said.