Have you ever heard a song so good you just HAD to share it with your friends? How did you go about doing that? It’s likely that you used a social media site to link the track to others, sending out individual or group messages to share your discovery. This presents a small problem, as the tune will only reach those you directly message it to. Sure you can post it as a Facebook status or Tweet it out to your followers, but not everyone is using these to look for music. And even with music specific sites such as SoundCloud, a repost can easily get buried under the hundreds of others reposts, never to be seen again. This is where 3 undergrad students from Tufts come in.
Amadou Crookes, Gabe Jacobs and Mario Gomez-Hall have just created the Instagram for music: Cymbal. They recently received $1.1 million in seed capital, allowing the trio to really get things moving and bringing their total valuation to over $6 million. Integrated with SoundCloud and Spotify, Cymbal allows you to post a song you’re really digging to your profile. People that are following you can see what was just posted in their newsfeed, creating a playlist of your friends’ top songs.
Since its release on May 1, Cymbal has received over 17,000 downloads across the country. Mario Gomez-Hall made a comment on the app’s popularity, claiming it was a hot topic amongst his friends:
Every time we added someone to the beta, we got five or ten texts saying ‘wtf dude, add me too’ …Cymbal was blowing up.
And the best part? It’s free! This might raise some concerns for those considering artist royalties and such. However, Cymbal already thought of this, designing their app to simply stream the song from the source itself, giving all play-credit to the original post. For example, say I wanted to post an RL Grime song from Spotify to my profile on Cymbal. When doing so, the app will simply ‘borrow’ the player from Spotify, and each play through Cymbal will result in a play on Spotify. Therefore, artist royalties will not be affected by the app, as they will still be handled through the original host site (Spotify in my example). With such an artist-friendly interface, I can really see a lot of big names getting behind Cymbal.
Unfortunately for us Android users, Cymbal is only available in the Apple app store – though a beta is currently in development. All you people with iPhones can check it out HERE!
