For the past year, most of my working life has been spent listening to music using a service – now discontinued – called Soundrop.
Soundrop was an app in the Spotify app ecosystem which offered music genre-based listening rooms with group chat and democratic track queueing; whichever track in the playlist had the most votes got moved to the top of the queue to play next.
This method of listening to music is by far my favourite, as it has brought me to new music of all sorts of genres which I wouldn’t have listened to without a recommendation from someone else passionate about music. Just the simple fact that every track played has been added and voted for by at least one person means that every track I listen to has a vote of confidence from someone who shares my music taste enough to be in the same room as me. If you’ve never tried social music listening like this, I thoroughly recommend it.
However, at the start of 2015 Spotify sadly moved away from their embedded app ecosystem, which disappointed many users of a variety of apps and caused most of the communities built in Soundrop to disintegrate. Some of the more tight-knit groups of listeners decided they didn’t want to lose the service they had loved and community they had built up over several years, so a couple of community projects were launched to form a replacement service.
The most serious Soundrop replacement, and the one which I have contributed a little bit of effort towards and hope to contribute more towards in the future, is called Soundbounce, and you can download it for Windows and Mac OS X today at soundbounce.org
All the code is hosted on the lead contributor Paul’s GitHub: https://github.com/pdaddyo/soundbounce
If you like the idea and want to contribute, please feel free to check out the issue list and send a pull request!