Cymbal: Music Discovery Powered by Friends, not Algorithms
Rough Draft Ventures is excited to announce our investment in Cymbal, a music discovery platform that takes a new spin on music recommendations by using friends, not algorithms that several of today’s most popular music streaming apps use like Spotify or Pandora. Cymbal asks you to choose your theme song (or “cymbal”) of the moment to share to their platform and allows you to interact with other people’s “cymbals” to discover new music.
I have had a wonderful time using it, and you can see the anthems that I have been rocking so far on my profile page.
You can post any song you want on Cymbal by connecting the app to Spotify or Soundcloud. If a user posted a song from Spotify, you will only be able to hear a 30-second clip, unless you have Spotify Premium.
Besides just how smooth the app feels, I was mostly impressed by the co-founders’ stories and technical backgrounds. Turning down offers from places like Microsoft and Google, Gabe Jacobs, Amadou Crookes, and Mario Gomez-Hall are invested in making the best experience for all music lovers alike.
Gabe talked about how he first met his fellow co-founder Amadou.
I met Amadou in a software class. It was notoriously one of the hardest computer science classes, the weed-out class for computer science. We were programming partners for three projects. I knew he made apps, and he knew I made apps. So we decided to work together on some thing. We had a few side projects, and [these] were what we needed to learn to make something like Cymbal. The beginning of senior year, I came up with the idea of Cymbal and told Amadou, and he was immediately on board.
It wasn’t until later Gabe met Mario, who he calls “the missing link.”
He’s our designer. I knew of Mario from a lot of mutual friends, and he designed a lot of apps. The app-making community at Tufts was small, so we kind of all knew each other.
Gabe told us what he thought was the most interesting feature about Cymbal.
We just finished up a new feature that we think is really powerful. Basically what it is, is it allows users to see any other users that also posted song. For example, imagine I find this amazing new song on a blog, and I’m sure no one has ever heard of this. When I post the song, because of Cymbal, I may see that 3 people across the world also have posted this as their “cymbal”. These people that also share that same song will hopefully be people with similar music tastes that I can connect with. We’re really excited about this feature because we think its something new. It does two things: It helps you find people who have a similar music taste, but also tells you what is trending on Cymbal. It builds connections and also shows the virality of a song.
The Cymbal team is looking forward to building out the platform and reaching out to the music community more. They are currently working out of General Catalyst’s Boston office this summer and have plans to move to New York to be more with the music scene.
We realized as we were building Cymbal, that it wasn’t just about music discovery. We were building a social network of music lovers, and that’s the biggest challenge we face going forward.
You can download Cymbal’s iOS app on the App Store. Unfortunately, Cymbal isn’t out on Android just yet, but sign up for their beta! Also, be sure to check them out on Product Hunt.
