Soundwave is a Dublin-based music discovery app that consolidates listening activity from a phone’s native music player and streaming services (Spotify and Rdio) to surface recommendations based on friends and influencers. Since launch it has recorded over 165,000 downloads in roughly two-and-a-half weeks and tracked about 3 million song plays, with users across 182 countries and top markets in the U.S., U.K., Brazil, Ireland, Russia and Germany. The app has been featured by both Apple and Google — iOS alone featured Soundwave 443 times across 17 App Store categories in 144 countries and named it an Editors’ Choice — driving the early traction. Soundwave intentionally does not build its own player, instead using a workaround on iOS and Android to “listen” to other apps, a capability the team says differentiates it from competitors. The company is positioning its aggregated listening data as a Big Data product for the music industry, pitching the idea of a “Bloomberg Terminal or Google Analytics for music” that reflects actual listens rather than purchases or streams. It also plans to offer an external API to labels, radio stations, bands and other apps as an additional B2B revenue stream.

Total raised

$1M

Funding rounds

1

Latest round

Equity

Latest activity

Jul 2013