Cymbal: The music community

Thanks so much for hunting us, @nickabouzeid! We built the Universal Player because streaming is now the #1 way Americans listen to music, but the biggest streaming provider, Spotify, has a minority share of all subscribers. This means that, on average, most people you'll send a song to can't listen to it in full because they subscribe to another service. Sharing music with friends, as a result, is very unreliable. The Universal Player is built on Cymbal’s matching algorithm, which has been live in our app for close to a year. If you haven’t used the app yet, Cymbal is the music social network for Android and iOS devices. In the past, we’ve been called “Instagram for music”: Share your favorite song from Spotify, SoundCloud, or Apple Music, and follow anyone who matters to you to discover songs the world is falling in love with. We had a problem, though: If you share a song from Apple Music, and I’m a Spotify subscriber, I wouldn’t be able to listen to it, even though I already paid for it with my own subscription. We thought that was very silly, as if I couldn’t text you because you were on AT&T and I was on Verizon. Would you even text people if that were true? We fixed this problem in the app by making sure everyone listens to every song on the streaming provider they pay for. Then we realized that same problem is everywhere on the internet, too. Hence, the Universal Player. Other folks have worked on this problem in the past, but we think now that streaming is ascendant in music, this has become an eminently imperative tool. Social music can’t exist without it, and our goal is to use it to ultimately power all the listening on the internet. Give it a spin! You can search any song or album on our homepage, cymbal.fm, and share it straight to your friends. To make things even easier, we built an iMessage app that sends our Universal Song links, and today are announcing a brand-new Chrome Extension that automatically transforms any song from our three major streaming services playable, anywhere on the internet, so you never have to encounter a song you can’t listen to. Get that here - https://chrome.google.com/websto... I’ve written more about this over at Medium, I’d love it if you gave it a read. https://medium.com/@ciwk/the-uni... I’d also like to take a moment to thank Cymbal’s amazing team, @ascrookes, @gabejacobs, @smilespurcell, as well as our friend and former Head of Product @nadomars, who designed the player. We received amazing help from our advisors @ronrofe, @badboyboyce, and @tjmahony on our path here. We can’t wait for what’s to come. Here’s to the listenable internet!

Charlie Kaplan

Cymbal Universal Translator for Chrome

Maker

8yr ago

Sergiu Cazac

Any plans of adding Tidal support? This app could really solve a big problem for, as a lot of blogs post songs with iframes from youtube/spotify/soundcloud etc. and I didn't event think this could have a solution. Good job.

@sergiu_cazac We'd absolutely love to. TIDAL doesn't currently have a streaming API for us to build on, but as soon as we can get some sort of access we'll get them on as soon as possible. We've reached out for access in the past, hopefully they'll grant it soon!

@ciwk Thanks you very much. Even that they don't have an API, somehow there is an add-on for kodi (xbmc) for Tidal, so there's probably a way.

@sergiu_cazac Thanks for the tip! We'll look into that now. Hopefully we can get it in...

Nick Abouzeid

Ramp

Hunter

Cross-platform music sharing. No longer will I have to fight with my girlfriend about whether Spotify or Apple Music is better 😈

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