A social discovery

Look beyond playlists curated by streaming platforms. These social music apps are revolutionising the way people discover songs

Imagine if you could experience a short trailer of a song before listening to the whole track and deciding whether you like it enough to add it to your library. Humit, a social music discovery app is doing exactly this. It was launched in March 2021 by three BITS Pilani graduates who finally worked on their campus idea after keeping it in the cold storage for nearly four years. Rohit Ganapathy, Prithvi Shankar and Ishaan Negi often discussed how music is intrinsically social. “But, we realised that streaming services were fundamentally designed for private listening. We thought a social music discovery platform was needed,” says Shankar. In 2018, they shelved the idea believing that a mega tech firm would be better equipped to work on it. But, once again in 2020, chatter around the idea grew when they saw how streaming platforms had gradually begun opening their Application Programming Interface (APIs) through which a third party platform could directly integrate and access their entire catalogue of music free of cost. “So, this meant that we didn’t have to worry about licensing content. On the other hand, there was a rapid wave of short form content and audio as a format,” adds Shankar. He explains that social media apps are built fundamentally around an individual’s social graphs and one is likely to know the other person and will want to consume content shared by them. However, COVID led a trend of vertical social media platforms that cater to interests rather than social graphs. “Think of Humit as the lovechild of Reddit and Spotify.”

Lishash, founded by Shashwat Singhal and Tanya Desai is another vertical social music discovery app that focuses on building technology with harmony both, in real life and digital. It is a community of music lovers. Social media discovery is a broad term, according to Singhal. It can mean discovering music solo or listening to music with other people, or even broadcasting and sharing music on Reddit and on other platforms. “Our take on social music discovery is to club all of this together into a holistic social music experience,” says Singhal. The idea for the app was born in 2018 when he came up with an emotion detection hardware setup while studying in UCLA. The idea evolved from this hardware device to intimate house concerts, music sharing, a discord community to finally listening to music together online via the Lishash app. The app was launched towards the end of 2019 and still remains an invite-only platform. This is to ensure that they build a strong initial community of music lovers, which is not only wholesome, but also inclusive. Based on the responses offered by users, the team decides whether 
to include the person in the community or not.

Sharanya Mosalakanti with friends she met on Lishash at an offline F16s gig at Pune last October

While Humit is available to download globally, both apps focus on ensuring that people can discover music from new genres, artistes and even languages—anything they may have not heard before. Humit has short 30 second-long ‘hums’ or snippets that are usually the best bit of a song. The user can pick any part of the song and upload it on a station, which is genre or artist related. If the users follow that particular station, they can access those hums to which they can react in the form of likes, comments. They can even message the person directly and start a conversation. They can save the track in a separate playlist on Spotify, the only audio app they are currently integrated with.

Lishash, on the other hand, was born out of the issue of choice overload. “Why do we have to always choose what we want; why can’t technology just give us more control?” wonders Singhal. Lishash is for people who want to discover music without having to tell the app what they desire, because put simply, they don’t know what they want. The app is currently integrated with Spotify, Apple Music and Youtube. Lishash takes songs from everyone’s library and starts playing if someone does not queue their songs during listening sessions. Unlike Discord, there isn’t a set queue on this app and it recommends music based on your actions like skipping a song or the filters you add. “We initially thought we would replace how Spotify and Apple music work, but then we realised that people love playlists and will continue making them but when it comes to discovering music, that’s when social apps will come in,” says Singhal. According to Desai, that a user can share his or her personal thoughts and anecdotes, make the app stand out and give people a sense of community, something that’s missed in streaming platforms. “To know that there is something being shared with me because someone wants me to know about it enhances the discovery aspect. It’s not just some machine suggesting something to you; it is someone you care about who is putting the effort to share. That’s the social element and makes this more meaningful,” Desai believes.

(From left) Chief designer Pradyumn Awasthi, co-founders Rohit Ganapathy, Ishaan Negi and Prithvi Shankar of Humit, a social music discovery app

Since Lishash is also about building a community offline, a few people got together in Pune last October for a music gig. Sharanya Mosalakanti has been using the app since April 2021 and joined the gang. She says it didn’t feel like she was meeting them for the first time because they had bonded through Lishash. “I didn’t interact with everyone I met on a personal level but I still knew what kind of music they preferred and what bands they listen to,” says Mosalakanti. She has been part of an Indian indie music community on Discord but says that there it was just people listening to music and appreciating it. At Lishash, she says it’s about appreciating people who listen to all kinds of music. 

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