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A new social network has been quietly blowing up with Gen Z and younger, and it’s not from Meta.
San Francisco-based Airbuds offers a mobile, social app that lets people express themselves through their music. Users can share what they’re streaming with friends through a smartphone widget that works with a range of streaming services.
On Wednesday, Airbuds is announcing its raise of $5 million in funding from early-stage venture capital firm Seven Seven Six, founded by Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian.
The startup has seen over 15 million app downloads up to this point, and has 5 million monthly active users, 1.5 million of whom launch the app daily. For users, the app offers a way to socialize and connect with their friends, engage in self-expression, and discover new tunes, all in one place.
That’s a combination that top music providers like Apple and Spotify have yet to figure out. Apple has tried and failed multiple times to integrate a social experience inside its music apps. That effort began with its disastrous music social network Ping, which closed down in the early 2010s, and was followed by a revamped attempt known as Connect, aimed at connecting artists and fans. (Connect also didn’t last.)
Spotify, meanwhile, has been working to make its music streamer a more social app with additions like its TikTok-inspired feeds, comments, polls, and Q&As for podcasts, artist stories, collaborative playlists, a messaging feature, and more.
Yet neither company has found the sweet spot when it comes to offering a true social network, because building popular consumer social experiences can be difficult and unpredictable.
Fortunately for Airbuds co-founders Gilles Poupardin and Gawen Arab, they’ve had time to iterate on their ideas.
Poupardin has been building products for consumers since his college days, including a Pinterest-like music bookmarking tool, a voice-controlled smart speaker (arriving just ahead of Amazon’s Echo debut), and a social audio app called Cappuccino that let friends make mini-podcasts together. Arab, meanwhile, had worked on the smart speaker with Poupardin and then later did a stint at Zenly, the social app maker that sold to Snap for $350 million in 2017.
After the Cappuccio team sold the app and its related IP to a meditation studio called Sociaaal, the startup moved on to a widget-oriented app, resulting in Airbuds.
“Because I built all of these music products in the past, I knew that when you ask the users to create a playlist or to do something, it’s a lot of effort,” explained Poupardin, in an interview with TechCrunch. He saw that iOS widgets, which were still relatively new to the iPhone at the time, were popular with teens. That led him to think about building a widget that would show you what songs your friends were streaming.
“Basically, it’s effortless. You just connect your Spotify, and then every time you’re going to listen to something on Spotify, it’s going to be shared on Airbuds in real time,” he says.
Today, Airbuds supports Spotify, Apple Music, Soundcloud, Musi, Deezer, Amazon Music, and Audiomack.
While Airbuds’ core functionality remains the widget, the app has built on top of that experience to offer a range of other social features.
Users can react to their friends’ streamed songs with emojis, stickers, or selfies clipped out from photos with the background removed. As users scroll the app’s feed, they can play clips of their friends’ streamed songs and even chat with a friend through a simple, built-in messenger. When you want to stream your music but not share it, there’s a “ghost mode” option to keep your listening private until it’s disabled.
Airbuds will also display friends with similar music tastes and deliver a personalized Weekly Recap of what you streamed, like a miniature version of Spotify’s popular year-end review, Spotify Wrapped. And it’s experimenting with a new feature that would let users join their school on the app to see the music top artists from their schoolmates.
Users can also customize their profile (or “Space”) by adding favorite artists, songs, albums, lyrics, pictures, text, and more, or let the app automatically design it for them.
This self-expression feature is key to the app’s traction, Poupardin believes, as around 30% of users now engage with the app’s features beyond just seeing what friends are streaming.
The streamers, he said, “gave us access to 100 million songs, but nobody really cracked the identity piece, the self-expression piece…and this is exactly how they use it,” referring to Airbuds’ young users, who are mostly high schoolers and college students in the U.S. (The app also has some traction in the U.K., Australia, Brazil, and Mexico.)
However, some of Airbuds’ traction can be chalked up to its feature-gating, which requires users to invite friends to gain access to some of the app’s functionality. For example, you have to invite friends to see more than your top 3 artists in the recap. But Poupardin stresses it’s not just for growth — the app only really works if you add your friends.
With the new funding in hand, Airbuds is planning other ways to expand its app, potentially by supporting other types of streaming services, providing artist-to-fan connections, or designing features to attract older users. The team is also testing a subscription feature.
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.
