Today’s Neat Music App: Shared Playlists & Compare Tastes
Where do you usually go to find new music? Spotify playlists or radio programs are usually a good place to start, that’s for sure. But for me, I tend to trust my friends a bit more than on-air strangers or an algorithm. In the past that usually meant digging through a friend’s record collection or scrolling through their iPod, but now my phone does it for me – the future is now! A neat little iOS music sharing app called Synchronicity released earlier this week. It makes comparing music with your friends a lot easier, and also has features like shared playlists to make spreading your music fun, too.
The idea is simple. You and your friends fire up Synchronicity and connect to each other either through the app or iMessage. The app automatically compares the music stored on your device and on Apple Music to your friends’ libraries and spits out a list of songs, artists and albums that you do and do not share. It also analyzes your libraries to see how similar your tastes are, and highlights where you differ. All that info is mostly just to satisfy your curiosity – I know I’ve always wondered what my friends and I both listen to, so having those shared artists pop in front of me is neat to see.
The discovery part comes in looking at what your friend has that you don’t. The app automatically links to download pages and related tracks for each song, so you can bookmark tracks that catch your eye as you scroll. And if your friend’s music taste index is a strong match with yours, the hope is that you’ll find plenty of new stuff to get excited about. But the app really shines with its shared playlists: you and your friends can collaborate and build a playlist between your devices – perfect for parties or road trips.
Synchronicity is a simple little thing that is fun to play with every once in a while – good thing it’s free! Hopefully its developer flushes out a couple more uses for the app, but for now it definitely fulfills a niche curiosity in discovering friends’ musical leanings. It’s available now on the App Store – unfortunately, there’s no version available for Android users.
