Finding Friends — Maybe Even Lovers — Through Music-Sharing Apps
By Larisha Paul
At the begin of 2020, 15-year-old Joey Khor spent her days anticipating the weekly meeting of her Malaysian high school’s choir club. Not for the practices where the categorize attempted to brilliant the setlist to their upcoming performances, yet for the spontaneous moments as soon as each person suddenly broke into song. “It habitually sounded better as soon as we were having fun and singing as soon as we felt like it,” Khor told MTV News, reminiscing on belting out Ariana Grande’s “
7 Rings” and Jessie J’s “
Flashlight” with her peers. “When lockdown came, I remember thinking, what’s gonna happen right now? There [would be] no times soon after school or at school to just have fun with people that enjoyed the same things you.”
because the world approaches the one-year anniversary of enacting lockdown protocols in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, music fans continue to be isolated from key social outlets for meeting and bonding with their peers. However as after-school programs, concerts, and fan-centric events are on hold, more music is being consumed than ever before.
MRC Intelligence reports global on-demand audio song streams increased 22.6 percent during 2020, reaching 2.2 trillion streams across platforms. Right now, young app developers are merging those two worlds, using listeners' streaming statistics to make personal social experiences with an emphasis on connecting them to users with similar listening habits and music preferences during isolation.
Khor had initially taken to TikTok to find others who shared her musical interests, nevertheless she noticed the video-based social media app also intimidating. “There can be some judgmental people on there,” she says. So once a
video came across her For You page announcing the launch of
Musicpals.Io, an anonymous messaging app that uses Spotify statistics to match users based on their most-played songs, Khor was all in.
“It doesn’t feel pressured,” Musicpals founder Scott Hiett tells MTV News. “I wanted to make something available and friendly to everyone.” The 17-year-old programmer wrote the code in three days over the Christmas 2020 holiday weekend, hoping to bring with each other a dozen of his companions and maybe reach a couple of hundred users. Right after launching the app on December 27, Hiett made a TikTok about the site for his 50 followers and yes it went viral overnight. The video, which right now sits at 2.6 million views and 650,000 likes, brought in more users than Musicpals could stage name, so he rushed to recode the site to accommodate its new user base.
With 4 million logged matches, the 1 million users on Musicpals “have actually noticed like-minded people because it’s based on your passions of listening to music,” Hiett says. For Charlotte Grace, 20, the app has recommended a chance to prepare new companions as she completes her first term of university entirely online. “I matched with a girl who listens to the K-pop sort
Seventeen and we noticed that we live pretty close to each other,” Grace says. Right after exchanging Instagram handles, the pair have spoken frequently and wish to meet in person once lockdown restrictions are lifted in the United Kingdom. “I think we may would be really good friends.”
“I think the exhilarating factor that Musicpals gives you is that risk of never speaking to that person again,” says Hiett, who purposefully designed the site to never match the same two people more than once. That gives each interaction a unique and thrilling feel where the stakes are high and each DM would be kismet. The comments beneath Hiett’s original TikTok post and Twitter’s Musicpals tag are riddled with
missed-connection stories as users aspire to be
reunited with their matches who were lost once the site either crashed or refreshed. “It makes it feel like the suspense is so much higher — whenever you drop into a chat with someone with music that you both love, you know you’re going to get on. Nevertheless you must act fast, or you’re never going to be able to see them again,” he says.
Londoner Katie McDermott, 22, matched with Californian Zoe on Musicpals through mutual love of
Conan Gray’s “Heather.” The pair were already a hour into their conversation about life in lockdown and the contradictions in their countries before they even exchanged names. “Since we’ve been in lockdown, it’s quite nice to speak with new people,” McDermott says. She and Zoe were messaging back and forth for over three hours once they were suddenly disconnected. “I was a little bit disappointed since we were speaking for so long plus it just happened mid-conversation,” she explains. “I didn’t get a Discord or anything from her to possibly speak in the future, yet that’s life.”
For some music fans, knowing that their tastes align with other people’s is enough so far, even outdoor of Musicpals. Inspired by the idea of distributing comfort through relatability, Matthew Meyer started creating and sharing Spotify playlists with his
TikTok audience of nearly 40,000 followers. The playlists usually attempt to evoke specific scenarios, like summer nights, watching sunsets, and falling in love. “Everybody felt so isolated lately,” Meyer, 19, says. “It feels like we are in our own world, although we’re all together.”
On occasion, Meyer will create playlists
tailored specifically to individual followers based on the emojis that they think best describe themselves. The series has done wonders for his engagement on the platform, with
one video obtaining 10,600 comments, yet it’s also helped him communicate with his audience solely through music. “If I mention, here are 10 songs just for you, based off of your vibes,” he explains, “I like to think that that person sitting in bed alone [can feel like] these songs are made just for me, and I’m going to dance to them and it’s going to create me happy.”
The popularity of Meyer’s
playlist videos, which have amassed over 1.5 million likes, caught a persons vision of David Yap, co-founder of social media platform
SameTunes that launched in August 2020. A joint effort by Yap, 23; Marc Frankel, 21; and Bonnie Sun, 22; the app uses statistics collected from Spotify and Apple Music to give users access to their top songs, artists, albums, and genres. SameTunes partnered with Meyer to elevate their platform, which currently boasts 10,000 users, and to distribute his audience a chance to compare their listening habits to his own. “It gives them a compatibility score and it’ll make them their own playlist with a mashup of my music taste and their music taste,” Meyer says. “It doesn’t perpetuate the gatekeeping I try very hard to keep out of my TikToks [by putting] disclaimers in the comments saying my music taste doesn’t define what is beneficial music,” he adds of the strictly data-based app.
“We’re habitually attempting to dig deeper into ourselves and we visualize that music plays such a key segment of that,” says Yap, who refers to SameTunes as a year-round version of Spotify’s annual Wrapped personal statistics roundup. Speaking with hundreds of fans to better understand how they connect through music, he discovered that a lot of people create playlists with, and for, their companions and family member as a way of communicating without speaking directly.
“It’s such an intimate thing,” Yap says of sharing music. “It’s like a love language.”
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