Soundwave is an interesting little tool that lets music lovers share what they’re listening to. Unlike Rdio, which silos all users into a single service, Soundwave takes cues from Last.fm’s ancient Scrobbling platform, consolidating listened tracks from a variety of online services like Soundcloud, YouTube, Deezer, Rdio, Spotify and others.
It was part discovery network, part social network. Now, with Soundwave 2.0, it’s also a chat platform. The app now wants to be the layer between private music sharing chat rooms, making it incredibly easy for its user base to listen to practically any full, in full, across disparate services.
The idea is that, by plugging in to a number of streaming music APIs in a single front-end UI, Soundwave can overcome the traditional barriers to music sharing. Typically, if I share an Rdio link but my friend does not subscribe to it, he can only hear a 30-second snippet of the song.
With Soundwave 2.0, the app does all of the work: just begin a chat, search for a song and share it with a friend or a group of them, and based on which services they have signed up for, Soundwave pushes the full track to them.
While Soundwave has yet to take off in the mainstream, and likely won’t become a default chat app for many people, its music-matching wizardtry has the potential to be integrated into other chat apps — you can imagine Kik, BBM or Facebook offering something like this in the future.
The full list of supported music services includes YouTube, Spotify, Soundcloud, Pandora, Rdio, 8tracks and Deezer. Hopefully Google Play Music will be added in the future.
[source]App Store, Google Play[/source]
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