airbuds - The Music Social Network

A Rising Social Network Captures Gen Z's Attention

A novel social network is rapidly gaining popularity among Generation Z and younger demographics, and it isn't affiliated with Meta.

Introducing Airbuds: Music-Centric Socializing

Based in San Francisco, Airbuds presents a mobile, social application enabling users to articulate themselves through the medium of music. The platform allows individuals to share their current streaming activity with friends via a smartphone widget, compatible with a diverse array of streaming platforms.

Securing $5 Million in Funding

Airbuds announced on Wednesday that it has secured $5 million in funding from Seven Seven Six, a venture capital firm specializing in early-stage investments and founded by Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian.

Impressive User Growth and Engagement

The startup has surpassed 15 million app downloads and currently boasts 5 million monthly active users. Notably, 1.5 million users engage with the app on a daily basis. Appfigures, an app intelligence firm, reports a 96% positive sentiment in user ratings over the past 30 days, based on over 9,400 reviews.

A Platform for Connection and Discovery

The app provides users with a space to socialize, connect with peers, express individuality, and uncover new music, all within a single environment.

Apple and Spotify's Social Challenges

This combination of features is something that leading music providers like Apple and Spotify have yet to successfully implement. Apple has made several attempts to integrate social elements into its music applications, including the unsuccessful Ping network and a subsequent effort called Connect, which also proved unsustainable.

Spotify's Social Experimentation

Spotify, in the meantime, has been actively working to enhance the social aspects of its streaming service through features like TikTok-inspired feeds, comment sections, polls, Q&A sessions for podcasts, artist stories, collaborative playlists, and a messaging function.

The Difficulty of Building Social Networks

However, neither company has fully achieved a compelling social network experience, as creating popular consumer social platforms can be a complex and unpredictable undertaking.

Airbuds' Iterative Development

Fortunately, Airbuds co-founders Gilles Poupardin and Gawen Arab have benefited from a period of iterative development and refinement of their concepts.

Founders' Backgrounds

Poupardin has a history of developing consumer products, including a music bookmarking tool reminiscent of Pinterest, a voice-controlled smart speaker developed prior to Amazon’s Echo, and a social audio application called Cappuccino. Arab contributed to the smart speaker project with Poupardin and later gained experience at Zenly, a social app acquired by Snap for $350 million in 2017.

From Cappuccino to Airbuds

Following the sale of Cappuccino and its intellectual property to a meditation studio named Sociaaal, the team transitioned to a widget-focused application, ultimately resulting in the creation of Airbuds.

The Inspiration Behind Airbuds

“Having built numerous music products previously, I understood that asking users to create playlists or perform other tasks requires significant effort,” Poupardin explained in an interview. He observed the growing popularity of iOS widgets among teenagers, which prompted him to envision a widget displaying the songs their friends were currently streaming.

“The process is remarkably simple. You simply connect your Spotify account, and whenever you begin listening to something on Spotify, it’s automatically shared on Airbuds in real time,” he stated.

Supported Streaming Services

Currently, Airbuds supports Spotify, Apple Music, SoundCloud, Musi, Deezer, Amazon Music, and Audiomack.

Expanding Beyond the Widget

While the widget remains central to Airbuds’ functionality, the app has expanded to incorporate a range of additional social features.

Interactive Features

Users can respond to their friends’ streamed songs with emojis, stickers, or selfies extracted from photos with background removal. Scrolling through the app’s feed allows users to play snippets of their friends’ streamed songs and engage in conversations through a built-in messenger. A “ghost mode” is available for private listening.

Personalized Experiences and Community Features

Airbuds also identifies friends with similar musical tastes and delivers a personalized Weekly Recap of streaming activity, mirroring Spotify’s popular Spotify Wrapped feature. The platform is currently testing a feature enabling users to join school-specific communities to discover the most popular artists among their classmates.

User Profiles and Self-Expression

Users can personalize their profiles (“Spaces”) by adding favorite artists, songs, albums, lyrics, images, and text, or allow the app to automatically generate a design.

The Importance of Identity

Poupardin believes this self-expression aspect is crucial to the app’s success, as approximately 30% of users now utilize features beyond simply viewing their friends’ streaming activity.

He noted that streaming services “provided access to 100 million songs, but no one truly addressed the identity aspect, the self-expression component… and this is precisely how our young users are utilizing it,” referring to the app’s predominantly high school and college-aged user base in the U.S., with growing traction in the U.K., Australia, Brazil, and Mexico.

Feature-Gating and User Engagement

Some of Airbuds’ growth can be attributed to its feature-gating strategy, which requires users to invite friends to unlock certain functionalities, such as viewing more than the top three artists in the recap. However, Poupardin emphasizes that this is not solely for growth purposes—the app is designed to be most effective when users connect with their friends.

Future Plans and Expansion

With the new funding secured, Airbuds intends to expand its app in various ways, potentially by supporting additional streaming services, facilitating artist-to-fan interactions, or developing features to attract older demographics. The team is also exploring a subscription model.

Total Funding to Date

To date, the startup has raised a total of $10 million from investors, including a16z, SV Angel, Dream Machine, Nikita Bier, Antoine Martin, Uncommon, and Night Capital.

Airbuds is available for download on both iOS and Android platforms.