Social media man­agers look­ing for inspi­ra­tion could well take a leaf from Soundrop, the bur­geon­ing inter­ac­tive “lis­ten­ing room” music service.

After attract­ing $3 mil­lion in invest­ment last year and first com­ing to mar­ket as an app on Spo­ti­fy, Soundrop is look­ing to break down the beat in oth­er areas with its new web version.

Cur­rent­ly avail­able only in beta, it allows music lovers to plug straight into pre-exist­ing music rooms that are cat­e­go­rized by genre, artists or ‘moods’, by using Spo­ti­fy’s relo­ca­tion to the web to break out the audio com­po­nent and link it up with videos post­ed to YouTube.

That might seem like a healthy degree of inno­va­tion, but where Soundrop real­ly scores is in its acces­si­bil­i­ty.  Spo­ti­fy may cur­rent­ly be read­i­ly avail­able in 28 ter­ri­to­ries; but Soundrop has glob­al reach.  Wher­ev­er Spo­ti­fy fails to work, Soundrop kicks in and reverts to locat­ing music uploaded to YouTube and Vevo.

Evo­lu­tion not revolution

While some may see this as bit­ing the vir­tu­al hand that feeds it, Soundrop CEO Inge-Andre Sand­vik is in no doubt that these devel­op­ments are advan­ta­geous for both par­ties. Soundrop is not about cre­at­ing a ser­vice that com­petes with Spo­ti­fy he says, it’s more about let­ting dif­fer­ent audi­ences know what they [Soundrop] are offer­ing: “This is not com­pet­ing. It’s more tar­get­ed to all the YouTube users out there that now can get curat­ed playlists, and pig­gy back on all the great cura­tion from all the Spo­ti­fy users.”

That’s not to say that the poten­tial for expo­sure stops there either. The web ver­sion has the capac­i­ty to syn­chro­nize users across plat­forms by meld­ing those using Soundrop’s Spo­ti­fy app as well as its Face­book app, thus bring­ing lis­ten­ers togeth­er by exploit­ing it’s native capa­bil­i­ty to sync audio and video.

Dri­ving suc­cess through social

So that’s the present – but what of the future? Well in a move that will inter­est com­mu­ni­ty man­agers and has cer­tain par­al­lels with the Twit­ter #Music ser­vice, Sand­vik’s plans include mov­ing out­side the con­fines of Spo­ti­fy and adding fur­ther music streams to pro­vide a real win­dow on what’s trend­ing. There will also be a func­tion that allows users to swipe tunes that they’re lis­ten­ing to in the web play­er and add them to their
Spo­ti­fy libraries.

Stay tuned, indeed.