Musaic App Embodies High Quality Music Curation

By Jerell Tongson

Musaic is an app in the ever-growing family of social based music discovery lanes available today.  It’s led by Scott Vener; overall music tastemaker whose credits include the former music coordinator for “Entourage” and “How to Make It In America” and the current lead music editor and curator of Myspace Music’s re-launch. This is a relevant starting point; Musaic embodies his career in a sense that high quality curation is the goal with this app.

Musaic pulls from the databases of Rdio , Spotify, and Soundcloud to form your library, or mosaic if you will, of music to select from.  From there, you can go through a list of featured users to follow (including Green Lantern, Mike Shinoda & Dillion Francis) to give yourself an example of how to work the app, in addition to adding Facebook friends who have already signed up.  Working your through the very clean and simply designed home page, it mirrors the ease of access to content like Instagram, with the music from users appearing in a single, very easily scroll-able stream down the screen. The music can be started and stopped on command with a tap of a finger, with buttons to comment, like and share.

The strength it tries to play up is the communal, collaborative aspect that has previously been utilized to varying levels of success within other apps (Spotify, Turntable.fm to name a couple).  Posting a song entails that you share it as a part of a “Jams” playlist that one shares with another friend; posting and collaborating together as a single virtual jam session in other people’s feeds.

SoundTracking (screenshot)

Unlike the one song post per X days model of This is My Jam, or the 30 second song clippings Pinterest-esk model of SoundTracking, Musaic encourages music sharing in its highest and most unadulterated forms across the widest selections possible..  The theoreticals are great: genuinely invested people that care about the music, sharing music with other genuinely invested people.  However, in order for something like this to succeed on idyllic like this, a large network of active users has to be in place.  And from where I’m standing, right now, that seemingly doesn’t exist.  The amount of users I had available to follow were those suggested to me by the app, those who were connecting with those people, and my roommate who I made sign up for the app as I have been playing around with it.  The penetration within the market of Musaic has been non-existent within my friend circles, therefore making it less appealing for me.  My friends are all on Spotify or Soundcloud, where the much higher number of users are but also where collaborative functionality is a much messier and multi-step endeavor than Musaic.  Whether they can rise above the noise, we shall find out soon.