While there’s no shortage of mobile apps for discovering new music, that doesn’t stop a steady stream of new incarnations hitting app stores around the world.
The latest one to hit our radar goes by the name of Musx, an iPhone app that taps YouTube’s gargantuan arsenal of music to create a social network of sorts around good tunes. While that may not sound overly innovative on its own, Musx does actually bring a nicely designed app to the table.
The problem, as Musx sees it, is this. While there are many services that cater for individual listening – Spotify, Rdio, YouTube and many, many more – when it comes to sharing a song, they all rely on social platforms such as Facebook. But people typically don’t visit social networks to listen to music, and these networks don’t save or record music that is shared, thus they tend to get lost in the foggy ruins of time. This is where Musx wants to help.
How it works
You can view a ‘what’s popular’ stream from strangers, or manually search for songs, adding to playlists or queuing them up to play automatically. While this is something that YouTube itself is becoming more proficient at, Musx also lets you connect with friends directly.
The 💜 of EU tech
The latest rumblings from the EU tech scene, a story from our wise ol' founder Boris, and some questionable AI art. It's free, every week, in your inbox. Sign up now!
Via the gift of Facebook, Twitter and your phone’s contacts, you can search for buddies already using the service – which, given Musx is still a fledgling platform, may not be many. It certainly wasn’t many in my case.
This could become a great music bookmarking and playlisting service for groups of friends. For now, it’s a good alternative to searching for and saving music you like on YouTube, while also getting a glimpse into trending tunes. However, you probably wouldn’t use this for discovering the latest, greatest new band. There are better apps for that.
Musx shows promise though. You can network with strangers, reshare music, add comments and give a thumbs-up. It’s like Facebook-meets-Instagram-meets-YouTube-meets… you get the picture.
Overall, Musx has been very well designed and thought-out and it’s certainly worth checking out. It’s optimized for iPhone and iPod touch, and is available to download from the App Store now.
Get the TNW newsletter
Get the most important tech news in your inbox each week.