Soundwave's updated app
An update to the Soundwave music discovery app will let users sync music plays from YouTube to their account and play videos in-app. The new feature is a way of targeting the younger demographics that use YouTube like a streaming service.
“A lot of these guys aren’t old enough to have extensive MP3 collections stored on their hard drives and they don’t have credit cards to purchase streaming subscriptions, so YouTube becomes the one-stop shop for music consumption,” explained Soundwave founder and CEO Brendan O’Driscoll.
To implement this feature, the app development team had to create a filtering system that would sync only the correct content – so it doesn’t register all the cat videos you’re watching, just the music videos.
The system has been beta tested and O’Driscoll said he’s happy that it’s “pretty water-tight”, adding that it will only get smarter as time goes on.
Another add-on with this feature means song videos from YouTube that appear in Soundwave feeds can be watched instantly from there, making discovery even more frictionless.
The Soundwave update goes live on the iOS and Android app today. As with all other sync options on the app, users can decide whether or not they want their YouTube plays to appear there.
The YouTube development is a strategic push by SoundWave into younger demographics.
“YouTube would be the biggest point of consumption of music in the world. The fact that we can cache it is important, especially for younger demographics who don’t have access to credit cards or would have an extensive MP3 library.
“Many would use YouTube primarily as their streaming service.”
O’Driscoll explained that in terms of downloads the service has just surpassed over the 750,000 downloads milestone.
“We see the addition of YouTube as closing the loop in terms of the various ways of listening to music today. We’re super excited to get this out there and in the first hour of the new update going live this morning we saw significant demand on the App Store and Google Play,” O’Driscoll said.
