When the music-focused social network Cymbal launched in 2016, the service promised to be a hub for music junkies to share their favorite artists and flaunt their great taste. Once you logged in, you'd see a stream of songs titles shared by whoever you were following, often accompanied by some sort of commentary or mini review. The goal was to create a feed that acted as a playlist, with everything curated by all the people who matter to you.
While the service was able to gain some traction among devout music nerds, its user base wasn't enough to keep the service afloat, and Cymbal recently announced it would be shutting down[1] this June.
Cymbal wasn't the first service dedicated to social music discovery. In 2010, Apple launched Ping[2], the social recommendation platform that lived and died inside iTunes. Three years later, Twitter announced #Music[3], which gathered tweets to show its users new music they might like. It shut down after a year. Let us also not forget the joy of fly-by-night website Muxtape[4].
As Cymbal learned, it's difficult to get people to enroll in yet another social network without a clear, unique benefit. "Even though we built this fabulous community and a product people loved, what we didn't quite figure out was one essential action that you had to do here," says Cymbal CEO Charlie Kaplan. "In Instagram's first two years, people were using it to make their photos prettier until they had enough users to say 'Instead of going to Facebook to look at photos, I'm just going to stay on Instagram.'"
Let's Share
There are few places where friends can share music with one another using just a...