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Airbuds is a recent "social media" app designed for people who listen to music. I'm guessing it's trying to be last.fm before the 2015 redesign, but more friend focused. This sounds cool, but Airbuds does a terrible job at this.
How it Works
The main way it works is by connecting music services, mainly Spotify, to the app. You can add friends using their username or phone number, and they will appear in your feed. You cannot follow people, you have to become friends through a friend request.
Everyone's recently played tracks, as well as other random tidbits, are thrown in the feed. The feed is TikTok styled, showing one track per "page". From the track page, you can play the iTunes preview, as well as other things that I will get to. The main issue with the feed is that its sorted in reverse chronological order.
I understand why so many apps are against algorithmic feeds, but they have a time and a place. The main issue with Airbuds being reverse chronologic is that people listen to more than one song in a session. As a result, your feed mainly becomes filled with the same person's tracks 20 times in a row. I get what they were trying to do here, but it doesn't work. The only thing you can really do about this is add more friends, however, it doesn't make sense to add random people on an app intended for friends.
However, recent tracks aren't the only thing shown in the feed. Little tidbits will sometimes come up about you or your friends. For example, you might see something like "user was in the top 1% of artist listeners this week!" These are fun at first, but they quickly get repetitive. Eventually, you will get tired of seeing every time you open the app that your friend who likes Chief Keef does indeed listen to Chief Keef.
Social
This app is intended to be a "social media," and there are some basic social features.
The main social feature takes place on the feed, and is reactions. You can react with an emoji or a sticker to a song your friend is listening to. You can only react with one emoji or sticker per song, but you give the same reaction per song multiple times. Reactions are persistent across the user you're reacting to's listens. These are fun at first, but quickly just become someone sending a heart whenever you play a song they recognize.
Note that to use stickers that aren't an emoji, you need to invite a friend to the app.
There are also little gimmick games. One of the main ones are roundups, which give awards to friends based on stats. This could be the person with the longest time spent listening, or the user who gave out the most reactions (2 is the most a friend reacted to anyone this week). You can also chat with users, but I have never seen anybody use this feature, ever.
There is also a music compatibility score, which is very quickly thrown together. As long as you listened to the same genre, song, or artist as someone at least once recently, that counts as a point. On top of this, you have to recalculate the score like once a week, and you have to do it for each individual user. This would be fine, but you have to wait for a 10 second animation to play for each one.
There is also a "Roast or Validate me" option, which is highly forgettable. You don't get to choose if you get a roast or a validation, you just get one. And the roasts are basically "Wow, you listen to genre. Way to be basic."
Finally, you can also start a Q&A, where people have to answer a question with a song. I don't see these used much. And when they are used, the question is just something stupid like "hawk tuah" and the replies are fart sound effects or something stupid. I'm not saying that there isn't a group of middle schoolers using this feature properly, I just don't see it.
Social App or Stats App
My final complaint with the app itself is that it tries to be 2 things at once.
One of the reasons Spotify does Wrapped at the end of every year is because people love to share what they're listening to, and it's free advertising for Spotfiy. Airbuds tries taking advantage of this by offering summaries and stats, but does a bad job at it.
For example, half the app is stats, and the other half are social features, and they don't blend well together. Also, all the statistics that are given are really obviously the "important" things people talk about during Wrapped. Summaries contain:
- Top artists
- Minutes listened
- Top genres
The hope, I'm assuming, is that people will share these to their social media stories and gather interest about the app. Except nobody does, because you're given so many summaries with so little information. It pains me, because I feel like some people are using this app just for the music stats, when last.fm would be an infinitely better choice for music tracking. You can't even see how many times you listened to a song on Airbuds.
Marketing
The biggest pain about this app is the way it's marketed. Instead of the team paying for ads, they have their users become ambassadors. The prompt for this appears quite frequently in the home feed:
This way, the team can pay the users much less for more exposure that can't be blocked with adblock.
The main things these ambassadors spread the app is making videos about it, primarily on TikTok. However, I have also seen that new ones are supposed to go around their college campus recommending the app. This may work (I don't know), but it becomes quickly clear what's happening when you download the app and it desperately tells you "Hey, we will pay you to spread the word about this app."
The biggest insult about this are the social media accounts. The videos are usually the most basic things about music you could say. Such groundbreaking posts such as "If America had Airbuds, it would be playing crying sounds on loop" posted after the election, or "I like listening to JPEGMAFIA. Please download Airbuds" with a cat picture attached. These are real videos I have seen.
These videos aren't bad, they're just annoying. You will see something, like it, and then finish reading it and realize it was an Airbuds ad and quickly unlike it. You can identify people in this program because their usernames are always @name.airbuds. Additionally, the videos they post usually have Airbuds related hashtags, but not all of them. I just have these muted.
Conclusion
This app is boring and stupid and bad and boring.