Apple Music + Social

Many Apple Music users have been asking Apple to add real social features to the service. A way to see what their friends are listening to, their playlists and specially a way to build collaborative playlists.

I'm thrilled to say that SoundShare brings all this to every single Apple Music user. But it also goes a lot further. Not only it allows any user to see what their friends are listening to, their playlists and to build collaborative playlists, it also gives you a way to like their songs, add a comment and tag a friend.

SoundShare

SoundShare is a full featured social music network. It allows you to see what your friends are listening to, like their songs, add a comment, tag friends, build regular and collaborative playlists and much more.

From left to right: Your profile page showing all the songs you’ve listened to; Your feed showing all the songs your friends are listening to; And the detail of a song showing likes, comments, mentions and more.

Connecting SoundShare to Apple Music

When you connect SoundShare to Apple Music, any song you hit play will be played from Apple Music, but without ever leaving SoundShare. This means that you can hit play on any song from your friends' playlist, from your feed, the top charts, suggested playlists and any other place inside the app and it will just work (assuming of course the song is available on Apple Music).

On the left, the More tab where a user can configure all sorts of things, such as connecting with Apple Music; On the right, the Apple Music login page.

Sharing a Song

SoundShare makes sharing extremely easy. You just need to listen to a song for over 30 seconds and that song will be automatically shared with all your followers. If you don't want everyone to see what you are listening to, you can just enable the privacy toggle and you are good to go. Only followers that you approve will be able to see the songs you share.

Apple Music Playlists

When you connect with Apple Music, all your Apple Music playlists will become available right inside your profile page, under playlists. Those will only be available to you, meaning that your followers won't see them when they go to your page on SoundShare. But if you share them or add them to your SoundShare's playlists, all your followers will be able o see it, play it, like it, leave a comment and a lot more, which is pretty cool.

You can also add any song you find inside SoundShare to them. Just tap on the Add to Playlist button bellow any song and choose a playlist from Apple Music.

Apple Music's playlist on the left and the top charts with the + button on the right.

My Music

All your music from Apple Music is also available on SoundShare and work the same way as any other song. Meaning you can add them to your playlists, share with your friends and a lot more. You can access it and listen to everything by going to the music player and tapping "My Music" on the top right corner.

You can also add any song you find inside SoundShare to your Apple Music library. Just tap on the + button bellow any song and album and it will be instantly added to your library.

The music player to the left player and My Music to the right.

Collaborative Playlists

Yeahh! The best part. Collaborative playlists! It's amazing how powerful this is, and how much better playlists we are able to build together with our friends. SoundShare brings this to every single Apple Music user.

To make it work you need to create a playlist inside SoundShare, not Apple Music. Why? Because it's SoundShare which is actually connecting everyone together. But don't you worry, you will be able to play them using Apple Music anytime you want!

After creating your playlist, you can add your friends to it by tapping on the + button inside it. To be able to add a friend you must be following them and they must be following you back. When you add someone, you grant them access to add, remove, rename and reorder your playlist. The only thing they can't do is add other friends. Only the owner of the playlist can do this.

The playlist view on the left and the playlist’s user picker on the right.

Bonus: Spotify, Deezer and neither.

As you may have seen in the "Connecting SoundShare to Apple Music" section, there were also options to connect SoundShare to Spotify and Deezer. This means that with SoundShare you don't need to stay "stuck" with only users that are on the same streaming service that you are.

It means that with SoundShare any user can interact with users from other services, like Spotify and Deezer. Yep, that's right! With SoundShare a user from Apple Music can even build collaborative playlists with friends who are using Spotify, Deezer or neither service.

When I say neither service is because if you don't connect SoundShare with any streaming music service it will still work. SoundShare in this case will use Youtube to play all the songs, and you will even be able to watch the full video clip. It's pretty awesome.

In this case everything will still work as normal. Sharing a song, playing it, liking it, adding a comment or mentioning a friend will still work just as before. Even building collaborative playlists. The only difference is that when connected to Spotify, Deezer or neither service, SoundShare will play the song from the right source instead of playing it from Apple Music.

Trust me, it works. And it’s extremely simple as well. You don’t need to worry about which service your friends are using, or how did they build that playlist. You just need to press play, SoundShare will handle the rest for you using the appropriate service.

SoundShare is free and can be downloaded from the App Store here. I hope you all enjoy this as much as I did creating it.

Matt

PS: Below I added a video showcasing the integration with Apple Music.

Apple Music Integration Video (password: revolutionss)