Y Combinator Backed bop.fm Launches Playlist Grabber, Furthers Mission to Revolutionize Way We Discover, Share & Experience Music Online
San Francisco, CA (PRWEB) April 08, 2014 -- Founded by a Thiel Fellowship mentor and incubated at Y Combinator, bop.fm announces the launch of Playlist Grabber, a new feature that allows users to import their playlists from other music services.
bop.fm is a music aggregator that compiles offerings from all the major music services, allowing users to stream, watch, or buy any song online, regardless of the service or country. bop.fm automatically searches music services like Spotify, Rdio, Beats Music, Deezer, SoundCloud, YouTube, iTunes, Amazon, and Google Play, taking user-service arrangements into account to generate a single stream and single purchase link guaranteed to work for everyone.
With bop.fm, individuals can share links with friends without worrying about country availability or paywall blockages, and they can assemble playlists seamlessly across service platforms.
Today with the launch of Playlist Grabber, users are able to import their existing playlists from other services, opening the bop.fm platform to music fans with pre-established tastes. Hence, users of other music services no longer have to start over from scratch when trying out bop.fm they can now bring their carefully curated playlist data with them.
"We believe in openness and universal accessibility when it comes to music, " says bop.fm CEO Shehzad Daredia. "Too many consumer internet services these days try to lock their users into their platform, thus preventing them from trying out other new products, even ones that enrich their own. By allowing users to bring their existing playlists into bop.fm, we make it easier for them to experience all the amazing benefits that bop.fm has to offer, such as a uniquely comprehensive catalog and cross-platform sharing, all while continuing to enjoy the high quality audio offered by their existing streaming service."
Initially, Daredia explains, the playlist import feature will only be available to Rdio and Spotify users, but it will soon support other platforms as well. Users can simply copy a playlist link from their Spotify or Rdio account and paste it into bop.fm's import tool. The tool then creates a playlist that can easily be played on bop.fm via the user's existing streaming accounts (Spotify, Rdio, Beats Music, Deezer, etc) or via other services like YouTube or SoundCloud. She can then add any song to that playlist, even if that song is not available in her streaming service. Finally, she can easily share that playlist with a friend and be confident that her friend will be able to listen using the streaming service of her choice. For Daredia, it’s a logical next step toward bop.fm’s goal of an inclusive digital music experience.
“For the last decade or so, the way people access music has gone through dramatic and rapid changes,” says Daredia, who led user acquisition at Kayak.com before co-founding bop.fm. “If you look at user activity now, there is incredible diversity in the public’s interaction with music. Some of the services are paid, some are ad-funded, some are free with limited content. What you have are a number of niche services with different advantages and shortcomings, and then a few larger services that take larger, but still incomplete sections of the market.
“For all the abundance of options, there is no unified experience for music. Some links will work for some users but not for others, some people pay to join services but can’t share their interests and tastes with friends who haven’t it’s all very fragmented. We created bop.fm to sit on top of all the various ways people access music and streamline the process, fostering cohesion in the experience.”
“On its most basic level, bop.fm is an aggregate search engine for music,” says co-founder and CTO Stefan Gomez, adding that he and Daredia had worked on a combined 11 search-based sites prior to developing Bop. “By analyzing a broad swath of online offerings on any given song in light of a user’s service affiliations, it provides a single link that works for anyone, anywhere, no matter which services they have and haven’t joined.”
Called the “Switzerland of digital music,” bop.fm is designed to work with and on top of other third-party music services with established user bases. “Playlist Grabber,” as CTO Stefan Gomez explains, “is another way we’re helping music fans integrate the digital music landscape.”
Despite being in beta, bop.fm has been streaming over 100,000 songs per day. As Gomez explains, though, the company has even broader ambitions for its growth.
“Playlist Grabber is more than just an import tool. It speaks to Bop’s aspiration to become users’ preferred music streaming client, regardless of which streaming service they subscribe to. Anyone can bring their playlist in, add any song to it using bop.fm’s expansive catalog, and easily share it with another friend on another service, without worrying if her friend can play it. We know that we have a compelling experience to offer, but bop.fm has an eye on the broader scene of digital music. We’re aiming to make the internet a better place to find and listen to music. And this is a perfect example of our efforts: Playlist Grabber is an intuitive, high-powered tool that will enhance users' experience not just of bop.fm, but of whatever music service(s) they already use as well."
Incubated last summer at Y Combinator, bop.fm has already been talked about on LifeHacker, Hypebot, Digital Music News, The Next Web, GigaOM, and TechCrunch, which said that “bop.fm has piqued the interest of music portals, as well as labels,” calling it a “consumer and businessfriendly solution” to the “friction” of the present-day music experience.
With its new Playlist Grabber feature, bop.fm continues its upward ascent towards an integrated online music experience.
About bop.fm
bop.fm is a digital music aggregator revolutionizing the way we discover, experience and share music online. CEO Shehzad Daredia previously worked at KAYAK.com, BillShrink, and Rho Ventures prior to co-founding Bop with CTO Stefan Gomez, formerly a senior software developer at Science, development manager at BillShrink, and UX engineer at Foodily. bop.fm, still in beta, currently receives more than 100,000 song plays per day, and has partnerships with Deezer, RapGenius.com and others.
Shehzad Daredia, bop.fm, http://www.bop.fm, +1 (415) 508-6061, [email protected]
Share this article