Whyd for iPhone is a social network that lets you ‘bookmark’ music from across the Web

There’s no shortage of apps designed to help you find, discover, and enjoy new music, but that isn’t stopping a steady flow of new services to the space. This includes the likes of Amazon with its new streaming service, while the mighty Apple acquired Beats just last month.

Back in January, Whyd opened the doors to its own Web-based music service. But it’s not another subscription service à la Spotify or Beats. No, Whyd is essentially a social, community-based online bookmarking platform that lets you save all your favorite tunes from across the Web, including YouTube, SoundCloud, Vimeo, and Deezer, while chatting with other Whyd users about your shared taste in music.

Now, Whyd is opening up to the mobile masses via a dedicated iOS app, and we took it for a quick spin to see what this puppy can do.

How it works

Once you’ve logged-in (you do need to log in to use Whyd), you can access all your previous playlists and activity from your Web account, or start things off from scratch if you’re a first-timer.

If you’re not sure how to get going, you can always hit the ‘Hot Tracks’ button which will surface the most popular tunes that are being shared by other users.

Alternatively, you can go to ‘Stream’, and catch up on the music being shared by users you’ve chosen to follow. Or, you can get stuck in and start building your own playlists by manually searching for and adding them to existing or new playlists you create.

To add any track to your playlist or ‘Like it’, tap and hold it, and slide the little circle over to the ‘+’ or ‘Heart’ icons. And true to any decent social network, you can read comments and share your very own too.

With many standalone music-streaming platform serving as siloed vaults of social activity, Whyd is striving to open things up to create a streaming-service-agnostic platform for everyone. One that’s free, too. The company says:

“Whyd aims to let music lovers share and discover songs they love together, whatever the platform or catalog they come from, creating a cross-platform record collection for the streaming era.”

Of course, this isn’t an entirely new concept. Bop.fm is doing something similar, in terms of how it’s looking to create a single unified streaming service built from multiple platforms’ APIs. Then there’s the likes of Serendip, an app that very much reminds us of Whyd from a features perspective, though it seems as though Whyd is striving to be more of a social network than it is a music-streaming service.

“The idea is to share your favorite new tracks to Whyd instead of Facebook to diffuse to your music network,” explains Whyd’s Tony Hymes. “We don’t want to propose a “free radio” or to replace other music services, we want to provide a better social experience for sharing music than Facebook or Twitter, and to connect people with music.”

Since launch, Whyd has garnered north of 60,000 users, which is certainly enough to help create a sense of community for new users signing up for the first time. If you love music, and chatting to strangers (and friends) about new and old music, then you’ll probably like Whyd.

Meanwhile, Whyd is available to download from the App Store now, and we’re told that an Android incarnation is on the roadmap, though no specific timeframe has been given.

➤ Whyd | App Store