SoundShare Launches As Mobile Music Sharing Social Network
This is a guest post by Brenden Mulligan, the founder of band website creator Onesheet and ArtistData. Follow him on Twitter at @bmull.
SoundShare is free iOS app that helps music fans share what they're listening to. Once you launch SoundShare, you can set it to keep track of every song you listen to in the iPod app on your iPhone/iPod Touch. These songs are shared with your SoundShare network.
Founder Matt Abras describes the app as "something like what Ping should have been or Instagram meets music." In fact, the app borrowed a lot of design inspiration from Instagram.
It's not the only app trying to get users to share what they're listening to. Besides the internal sharing enabled in Rdio and Spotify (that now pours into Facebook), iOS app Soundtracking has been building a music sharing social network for months. Even though Soundtracking has over 750,000 downloads and a big head start, Abras isn't worried because he says SoundShare takes a different path.
"Sountracking shares a song with a picture or location. SoundShare shares in another way. You don't need to press a button to share. You simply start listening to your library. Your songs go automatically to your timeline. Soundtracking is all about the soundtrack of your life. The key songs of important moments. SoundShare is all about your music experience. Its a great place to discover new songs."
This difference causes SoundShare users to share a lot more music. Abras says the average user is sharing around 15 songs per day. And when you look at what your friends have listened to, there's a huge list of new songs to discover. Because of this volume and the built in music player, Abras says some users have started using SoundShare as their primary music listening app.
The biggest limitation currently with SoundShare is you have to be listening to MP3s from your iPod. Many users now listen to music through Rdio, Spotify, Soundcloud, Bandcamp, etc… These songs aren't tracked in SoundShare. Abras says he sees a time when all these services will be integrated, but that's still quite a ways off.
If you have an iOS device, give it a try for yourself. SoundShare is free in the app store.
Check out the video below for more info:
