Swipe right for your favorite new music on The Best Song

Did you ever used to listen to iTunes’ 30-second song preview before deciding whether to click ‘buy’? The Best Song, a new iOS and Android app, thinks that 30 seconds really is long enough to decide whether you’re listening to your new favorite song, so it serves up a stream of the shortened song previews with a Tinder-like interface to make music discovery as simple as a swipe right or left.

The Best Song allows you to listen through a selected playlist and quickly choose to ‘like’ or ‘dislike’ the track by pressing the buttons (or swiping left or right). When you like a song, it is added to your personal playlist. The interface also allows you to share the song with a friend through Facebook or email. Once you have a list of new favorite songs, the app allows you to export the playlist to Spotify or Deezer.

The app gives you three different types of playlists to listen through: a curated top playlist (like ‘Pitchfork Best Songs,’ ‘Best Songs of June,’ ‘Best Songs to Sing in Your Car), a selection of genres, or the random ‘Music Maestro’ option.

While curated playlists have become ubiquitous on music services, The Best Song allows you to quickly curate your own customized playlist. Rather than listening to entire songs from one of Spotify’s curated playlists (like ‘Afternoon Groove,’ or ‘Beach Vibes’) and choosing your favorite tracks, TBS gives you short snippets of songs from which you can create your own personal playlist.

The service caters primarily to the curious music consumer who wants to discover new tracks but might not have the time to devote to perusing blogs or full-length playlists from curators. It’s a new take on music discovery and it may expose you to some hot new tracks, but it’s not going to overtake music discovery through Spotify or Pandora anytime soon.

The French company, which just raised a $300,000 funding round, is still in its infancy: just 20,000 monthly active users according to TechCrunch.

from Planet GS via John Jason Fallows on Inoreader http://ift.tt/1Idwsla
Chris Leo Palermino