By Carolyn Heneghan

It’s happened to you before: you and your friends share songs on your Spotify account, but to share it on Rdio, YouTube or SoundCloud means a different music library and set of friends. Switching between the two—or three or more—can be tedious and time-consuming, which may not be worth simply trying to share a song with all of your friends.

Similar to what Tweetdeck did for Twitter users, bop.fm (currently in beta) aims to aggregate song shares from all of your music subscription services to keep your friends updated on all of your  shares—and to keep you up to date with theirs—no matter what network they’re on.

The best practice for sharing music has been hotly debated for some time, and YouTube links have generally reigned supreme in terms of ubiquity. But now with the introduction of this app, that discussion is soon to be over.

To use the app, sign in using your Facebook account. You have the choice to either Search or Discover. Search your new or favorite songs or artists, and that song will appear in a player onscreen. You then have the option to share that song using Facebook, Twitter or an embed code.

Click Discover to see a collection of the music your friends have been listening to. You’ll see a photo representing the song, and underneath it will be the title and the name of your friend who shared it. This makes it easy for you to browse what your friends have shared and discover new music via this platform.

For music bloggers, another benefit is the bop.fm embed code. This code will produce a player that auto-detects songs they mention in a music review or news post and pull that up from any sources that are relevant to the reader.

Coming soon will be a Now Playing section and a Radio station, likely with constantly streaming songs that users can listen to if they don’t feel like configuring a playlist. There will also be the ability to create Playlists.

Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures wrote about the need for a service such as this prior to the app’s release. In terms of consumer-facing benefits, Wilson writes from his own experience:

Just yesterday my friend Kirk found some new music because he follows me on Rdio. But I can’t do the same thing with my friends who are on Spotify. Because all of these services are silos, by definition of their paid business model. If a roaming network existed, there would be more social music discovery, listening, and, I believe, uptake of the paid subscription model by consumers.

Music discovery is key to bop.fm’s mission and success. It is the backbone of why users share music with others, and it is key to building their own libraries with new favorite songs, albums and musicians. Providing a platform that enables users to share their music with more friends more easily is positioned to be a boom of discovery that is beneficial to users, musicians and even paid subscription models alike.

For the music industry, this platform means reaching vast more listeners more quickly and easily. If a band can be found on SoundCloud but not Spotify, Spotify users can now enjoy that music by exploring their friends’ shares on the Discovery page. This gives up-and-coming bands a better chance to be heard by all users of these other subscription platforms—including those that may have a much larger built-in audience.

Even paid subscription services could see an uptick in customers. Say a bop.fm user sees a friend regularly post songs from different artists that he or she ends up really liking. If that user wanted to hear more from that particular artist, the friend would either have to share all of those songs, or the user would have to sign up for that subscription service to have access to the artist’s full library. If enough albums are not available on whatever subscription service(s) the user is already signed up for, then that user might sign up for the new subscription service to access that library of songs.

Once bop.fm see its full launch, expect to see a shift in the way people think about music sharing.

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