Music or Friends? Why not both?

Today is really easy to listen to what we love. We have Youtube, Apple Music, Spotify, Deezer, SoundCloud, iTunes and many more other music services.

But this number of services creates a problem, fragmentation. To me, one of the best things about music is discoverability and being able to exchange my discoveries with friends. Every single music service offers their own version of "the best" way to discover new songs. Some say they will understand your taste and recommend you stuff they know you will like, others try to create smart radios playlists and so on. But what about friends? To me, one of the best ways to discover new content is with my friends and family. Is sharing music experiences. And today this is terrible, due to the great number of services there are currently in the market.

For example, why is that if I use Spotify and my friend uses Apple Music we can't interact with each other? Music is made to be experienced together. To be enjoyed with friends, family and everyone you love. So why choosing a music service should separate me from others? That’s not how the world should be and not how it should work.

I get that if you are one of the music services you already have a lot going on. You have to pay artists, fight with music labels to get a better deal, scale your servers, fix bugs, study your users, understand how they are using your service and constantly improve it. Not only that, but you always have competitors trying to get part of your market. It’s hard, I know. There’s a lot going on. And of course, if you are one of these services, you are not going to partner with your competitor, that doesn't make any sense.

But to the end user, this situation is terrible. They are left to choose between the best service or their friends. For example, maybe I like Spotify, which has a great app, lots of playlists, Discover Weekly and even a social network. So, lets say I choose it as my main service. But then some close friends decide to use Deezer for other reasons. I will never be able to interact with them. So I'm left with 2 options. Use my favorite service and don't interact with my friends or go to a service that I like less, but where I can find my friends.

With Apple Music is even worse. Because even though some might think it's the best service in the market, with the best curation, best music catalogue and best playlists, it doesn't offer any social component at all. When I say social, I mean a network I can interact with my friends, share playlists with them, like their songs, comment on their content, tag friends on my discoveries and even build collaborative playlists. Which means that if my friends or I choose Apple Music, I'm certain I won't be able to interact with any of them.

So, there’s a need for a new service. One that brings all music streaming services together. Not a competitor but a partner. A service that will enhance everyone’s experience. That will kill all fragmentation and doesn’t matter which service you end up using, you will still be able to see what your friends are listening to, interact with them and why not, even create cross platform collaborative playlists.

The more I thought about this, the more I saw that this would become each day a bigger problem. As I said before, I always loved music, and always loved this whole sharing discoveries experience. So, five years ago I had a vision about this fragmentation issue. About how it would prevent us from having an insanely great experience in this market. So I set myself to try to fix this problem and I came up with SoundShare. The story behind it is pretty great but a bit long, so I won't get into the details here. But now, SoundShare finally got to the point where it will fix this problem.

SoundShare is an app that connects many music services together into just one social network. A place where you can see and play what your friends are listening to, create collaborative playlists with them, like their songs, add a comment and a lot more, no matter which music service they use. An app that will allow you to connect with your favorite service and have access to all the great features they offer, while being able to connect with friends on different ones.

For example, SoundShare allows a user on Apple Music to collaborate on a playlist with a user from Spotify, with a another user from Deezer, another one who buys their songs on iTunes and with a user from neither service, just SoundShare. That’s how powerful SoundShare is! It breaks walls, it builds bridges between services and brings people together.

If you liked the idea, feel free to get SoundShare here.

Matt

SoundShare CEO