A brand new social community has been quietly blowing up with Gen Z and youthful, and it’s not from Meta.
San Francisco-based Airbuds presents a cellular, social app that lets folks specific themselves by means of their music. Customers can share what they’re streaming with pals by means of a smartphone widget that works with a spread of streaming providers.
On Wednesday, Airbuds is asserting its elevate of $5 million in funding from early-stage enterprise capital agency Seven Seven Six, based by Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian.
The startup has seen over 15 million app downloads up thus far, and has 5 million month-to-month lively customers, 1.5 million of whom launch the app every day. In response to app intelligence agency Appfigures, Airbuds additionally has a 96% optimistic scores sentiment during the last 30 days throughout 9,400-plus scores.
For customers, the app presents a approach to socialize and join with their pals, interact in self-expression, and uncover new tunes, multi function place.
That’s a mixture that prime music suppliers like Apple and Spotify have but to determine. Apple has tried and failed a number of instances to combine a social expertise inside its music apps. That effort started with its disastrous music social community Ping, which closed down within the early 2010s, and was adopted by a revamped try often known as Join, geared toward connecting artists and followers. (Join additionally didn’t final.)
Spotify, in the meantime, has been working to make its music streamer a extra social app with additions like its TikTok-inspired feeds, feedback, polls, and Q&As for podcasts, artist tales, collaborative playlists, a messaging function, and extra.
But neither firm has discovered the candy spot relating to providing a real social community, as a result of constructing common shopper social experiences will be troublesome and unpredictable.
Luckily for Airbuds co-founders Gilles Poupardin and Gawen Arab, they’ve had time to iterate on their concepts.
Poupardin has been constructing merchandise for customers since his faculty days, together with a Pinterest-like music bookmarking device, a voice-controlled sensible speaker (arriving simply forward of Amazon’s Echo debut), and a social audio app known as Cappuccino that allow pals make mini-podcasts collectively. Arab, in the meantime, had labored on the sensible speaker with Poupardin after which later did a stint at Zenly, the social app maker that bought to Snap for $350 million in 2017.
After the Cappuccio group bought the app and its associated IP to a meditation studio known as Sociaaal, the startup moved on to a widget-oriented app, leading to Airbuds.
“Because I built all of these music products in the past, I knew that when you ask the users to create a playlist or to do something, it’s a lot of effort,” defined Poupardin, in an interview with TechCrunch. He noticed that iOS widgets, which had been nonetheless comparatively new to the iPhone on the time, had been common with teenagers. That led him to consider constructing a widget that may present you what songs your pals had been streaming.
“Basically, it’s effortless. You just connect your Spotify, and then every time you’re going to listen to something on Spotify, it’s going to be shared on Airbuds in real time,” he says.
In the present day, Airbuds helps Spotify, Apple Music, Soundcloud, Musi, Deezer, Amazon Music, and Audiomack.
Whereas Airbuds’ core performance stays the widget, the app has constructed on prime of that have to supply a spread of different social options.
Customers can react to their pals’ streamed songs with emojis, stickers, or selfies clipped out from photographs with the background eliminated. As customers scroll the app’s feed, they’ll play clips of their pals’ streamed songs and even chat with a pal by means of a easy, built-in messenger. If you wish to stream your music however not share it, there’s a “ghost mode” choice to maintain your listening personal till it’s disabled.
Airbuds may also show pals with related music tastes and ship a personalised Weekly Recap of what you streamed, like a miniature model of Spotify’s common year-end overview, Spotify Wrapped. And it’s experimenting with a brand new function that may let customers be a part of their faculty on the app to see the music prime artists from their schoolmates.
Customers may also customise their profile (or “Space”) by including favourite artists, songs, albums, lyrics, photos, textual content, and extra, or let the app routinely design it for them.
This self-expression function is essential to the app’s traction, Poupardin believes, as round 30% of customers now interact with the app’s options past simply seeing what pals are streaming.
The streamers, he mentioned, “gave us access to 100 million songs, but nobody really cracked the identity piece, the self-expression piece…and this is exactly how they use it,” referring to Airbuds’ younger customers, who’re principally excessive schoolers and faculty college students within the U.S. (The app additionally has some traction within the U.Okay., Australia, Brazil, and Mexico.)
Nonetheless, a few of Airbuds’ traction will be chalked as much as its feature-gating, which requires customers to ask pals to realize entry to a number of the app’s performance. For instance, it’s a must to invite pals to see greater than your prime 3 artists within the recap. However Poupardin stresses it’s not only for development — the app solely actually works if you happen to add your pals.
With the brand new funding in hand, Airbuds is planning different methods to increase its app, doubtlessly by supporting different forms of streaming providers, offering artist-to-fan connections, or designing options to draw older customers. The group can also be testing a subscription function.
So far, the startup has raised a complete of $10 million from buyers together with a16z, SV Angel, Dream Machine, Nikita Bier, Antoine Martin, Unusual, and Night time Capital.
