Soundwave delivers a new way to discover & share music on iOS/Android

Sometimes an idea can snowball in a relatively short time, going from a small accelerator project to an Eddy Cue-approved, Steve Wozniak and Stephen Fry-endorsed product that just launched internationally on iOS and Android.

That’s exactly what happened to Soundwave, a Irish startup founded in February 2012 that in little over a year managed to take a good idea an turn it into a great product. The iOS/Android app available from today internationally allows you to share what you’re listening to on your phone instantly as well as to follow friends and artists/celebrities and their listening habits. The best way to describe the Soundwave feed is to think of the equivalent of a Twitter feed that only includes the tracks that are being played by the people you follow.

Soundwave also includes a map feature that allows you to draw a map around where you are and see what other Soundwave users are listening to. This already works pretty well in London where there were a fair amount of beta testers but if the app takes off will become a valuable interesting way to discover local trends wherever you are.

Soundwave is different from apps that have attempted a similar feat in the past as it is the first to be allowed instant access to the tracks being played in the iTunes Music app, this is a big coup and is something that Last.fm had been trying to do for years in order to enable instant scrobbling from iPhones. You can also grant the app permission to tap into your Spotify and Rdio accounts so that the tracks you play on those services will appear as part of your feed as well.

One minor gripe of the iOS version - which I assume has to do with the architecture of the operating system itself - is that as of now you have to connect Spotify to Facebook in order for the app to be able to integrate what you listen to into the feed and so if you don't want for your music habits to become part of your Facebook timeline you have to take some time figuring out the privacy settings so that it appears to "Only You". On Android no such connection is required and Soundwave can read what you’re listening to directly from the Spotify app.

And so I hear you ask: what if you want to spend an hour listening to Britney on repeat in the privacy of your own home? Soundwave’s got you covered with the Guilty Pleasures function that hides music played for 60 minutes… you “Womanizer”.

Soundwave is a sink-or-swim play. Without mass adoption consumers will see little reason to keep going back to the app and the company’s business model, combining affiliate revenues a’ la Shazam, a data/analytics play and custom API versions for bands or radios, also requires large numbers of users in order to work.

The experience is certainly first class and a challenge to Last.fm, which should have figured out something similar ages ago. Users will decide whether this is something that warrants daily use or not but I would definitely recommend taking it for a spin.


(Andrea Leonelli)