Described as “music discovery powered by friends, not algorithms,” Cymbal is a new app looks to fill the strategic gap in the digital music business, where a truly social experience for music lovers has yet to be created.
The app, which launched this past May, was developed in Boston’s Tufts University by a trio of recent graduates, plays as an “Instagram for music,” bypassing unnecessary options, instead adopting a simple, less-is-more interface.
Like Instagram, the app allows users to post just one song alongside colourful album art. Also like Instagram, Cymbal includes a home feed, personal profile, followers, likes, comments, hashtags and tags.
The official Cymbal descriptions reads (in part) as:
“Cymbal is like Instagram, but you post songs from Soundcloud and Spotify instead of photos. Follow friends, artists, and tastemakers to populate your feed with the songs that represent listeners’ lives. Click play and the whole thing works as a sort of living playlist, curated by the ears you trust…Throughout our short lifespan we’ve been hard at work not just molding Cymbal into the app we want it to be, but making it the place you can go to find the music that’s shaping people’s lives on a daily basis. This has started with an unbelievable community of listeners, artists, and organizations, from The Needle Drop to Tiny Mix Tapes to No Sleep to Electric Zoo…”
An interesting angle for Cymbal, as well as its financial backers (recently receiving some $1.1 million in funding) is the fact that it does not threaten other music services. In fact, it complements them. If you discover your next favourite track, you can add it to your Spotify library and like it on SoundCloud directly through Cymbal. Cymbal, which is free, streams the music from host libraries and piggybacks on the deals they have.
You download ‘Cymbal’ from the Apple’s App Store – here
Source: Forbes
