Soundwave releases a major update focused on messaging

Just over a year from its debut, music discovery app Soundwave has launched a major update - its 2.0 version - for both iPhone and Android. Over the last 12 months Soundwave has been downloaded over a 
million times tracking 100 million plus plays. With this new version the company has set its sights on messaging.

The Music Messenger is in fact the central new feature of the app, allowing users to chat and share music with their friends and to create private groups where everyone they want to include can contribute to the conversation. The groups work well and it’s quite fun to throw and open question like “What’s the best song to wake up to?” or “What’s the best TV show theme tune?” and see the replies roll in.

Soundwave has also completely re-designed the app and added personalised recommendations which act both as a way to suggest new music and as a way to suggest users that have compatible tastes both in your local area and across the service. This is a major step forward as in the previous iteration it was hard to expand one’s circle of friends beyond people you could track from other social networks. 

As far as playback is concerned Soundwave allows all users to play 30 seconds of every song that appears in their timeline or in their messages, once they click to visit the song page users can choose to watch the YouTube video which is placed at the very top or open up their service of choice - Spotify, Rdio or Deezer. It’s a shame that the app doesn’t yet allow full in-app playback for premium users of those services but hopefully that will come in time.

Soundwave in its first iteration broke new ground by being the first music tracking service that could effectively gather data around consumer's music consumption on iOS. The issue with the app was that there was not a big reason for users to go back to it time and time again other than checking their feed or doing some geo-located searches of what was being played in a particular area. 

Messaging could be instrumental to increase the engagement of users on the app and make it a place where people go not just to share music but to message friends about their day-to-day activities. Soundwave does face significant competition from more established messaging apps who are starting to integrate music features, but its strong background in music tracking gives it an edge over the competition.

The update is out now so go check it out on the App Store or Google Play. 

(Andrea Leonelli)