The Rude Baguette has been following Whyd for a while now. The service started out as a very handy browser extension to bookmark your favorite songs from any platform – a tool much needed by music bloggers, DJs and all of us who spend hours looking for the latest musical breakthrough.
After they raised €700k in January and moved a part of their team in San Fransisco, they were able to bring this service to mobile: their IOS app launches today. The idea remains the same: finally being able to stream music from a variety of platform. Whyd differentiates itself from competitors (Soundrop, Music Player, Bopfm) with a very strong and active community, says Gilles Poupardin, Whyd’s CEO. Amongst users you can follow you’ll be able to find artists (C2C), concert halls (la Cigale, le Point FMR) or music TV programs (Arte Tracks). Ever since Whyd became open, the platform gathered about a million tracks which are all organized in playlists and sharable with anyone.
The ambition with the launching of the IOS app is to make this expert community accessible to a larger public. How it works: once you get the app, you can browse the database for music (available on Youtube, Soundcloud, Vimeo, Dailymotion and streamable MP3s) and create playlists. The real added value is social: you can follow users among the active music-lover community and discover awesome new tracks. Oh, and it’s free.
Summer homework for the Whyd team is making the app available on Android. The other goal for the service is to add Deezer and Spotify to the platforms streamable on mobile: since the sharing of music is at the core of Whyd’s “Why”, it seems only natural one Deezer user could be able to share a playlist with a Spotify user (if you can’t choose between the two: here are a few tips).