The new social network is quietly exploding after Gen Z, not from the meta.
San Francisco-based Airbuds offers mobile social apps that allow people to express themselves through their music. Users can share streaming with friends using smartphone widgets that run on a variety of streaming services.
On Wednesday, Airbuds announced $5 million in funding from Seven Seven Six, an early-stage venture capital firm founded by Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian.
The startup has seen over 15 million app downloads by this point, with 5 million active users every month, of which 1.5 million launch apps every day. According to App Intelligence Firm Appfigures, Airbuds has a positive rating sentiment of 96% over the last 30 days, across more than 9,400 ratings.
For users, the app offers a way to interact with friends, connect, engage in self-expression, and discover new songs all in one place.
This is a combination that top music providers like Apple and Spotify don’t understand yet. Apple has failed multiple attempts to integrate social experiences within the music app. The effort began with the disastrous musical social network Ping, which was closed in the early 2010s, followed by improved attempts known as Connect, aimed at connecting artists and fans. (The connection didn’t last long either.)
Meanwhile, Spotify has been working to make music streamers a more social app with additions such as podcasts, artist stories, collaborative playlists, and messaging features such as Tiktok-inspired feeds, comments, polls, Q&As and more.
However, since building a popular consumer social experience is difficult and unpredictable, neither company has found a sweet spot when it comes to providing a true social network.
Fortunately, Airbuds co-founders Gilles Poupardin and Gawen Arab, they had time to iterate over their ideas.
Poupardin has been building consumer products since college, including music bookmarking tools like Pinterest, voice-controlled smart speakers (arrived just before Amazon’s Echo debut), and a social audio app called Cappuccino where friends can make mini podcasts together. Meanwhile, the Arabs worked on Poupardin and smart speakers, then stints at Zenly, a social app maker that sold on Snap for $350 million in 2017.
After the Cappuccio team sold the app and its associated IP to a meditation studio called Sociaaal, the startup moved to a widget-oriented app, which resulted in Airbuds.
“I’ve built all these music products in the past, so when I ask users to create playlists or do something, I knew it was a lot of effort,” Poupardin explained in an interview with TechCrunch. He saw that iOS widgets still relatively new on iPhones at the time were popular among teens. That made him think about building a widget to show you the songs your friends are streaming.
“Basically, that’s easy. You just connect Spotify and every time you hear something on Spotify, it’s going to be shared in real time on Airbud,” he says.
Today, Airbuds supports Spotify, Apple Music, SoundCloud, Musi, Deezer, Amazon Music, and Audiomack.
While Airbuds’ core features still remain widgets, the app is built on top of that experience and offers a variety of other social features.
Users can respond to friends’ streamed songs with emojis, stickers, or selfies cropped from photos with background deleted. Users can also play clips of friends’ streamed songs as they scroll through the app’s feed, or chat with friends through a simple, built-in messenger. If you want to stream music but don’t want to share it, there is an option to keep listening private until the “Ghost Mode” option is disabled.
Airbuds displays friends with similar music preferences and offers a personalized weekly summary of what you stream, like a miniature version of Spotify rap, a popular year-end review on Spotify. And they’re experimenting with new features that allow users to join schools through the app and see their alumni music top artists.
Users can also customize their profile (or “spaces”) and have their apps automatically designed by adding their favorite artists, songs, albums, lyrics, photos, text, and more.
This self-expression feature is key to app traction and Pouperardin is because around 30% of users are involved in the app’s functionality as well as seeing what their friends are streaming.
The streamer said, “We’ve made access to 100 million songs, but no one actually cracked the pieces of identity, the pieces of self-expression… this is exactly how to use it,” referring to the younger Airbuds users being high school and university students in the US (the app has also attracted some attention in the UK, Australia, Brazil and Mexico.
However, some of the traction power of the Airbuds can be choked up to its functional gating. This requires users to invite their friends to access some of the app’s features. For example, you should invite friends to see more than the top 3 artists in a summary. But Poupardin emphasizes that it’s not just about growth. The app actually works only if you add a friend.
With new funding in hand, Airbuds plans to expand its app by supporting other types of streaming services, providing connectivity between artists and fans, and designing features that attract older users. The team is also testing the subscription feature.
So far, 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 on iOS and Android.
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