I heard about Soundsgood, a music service that recently launched as a desktop application worldwide, and decided to check it out to see if it was anything unique. With a focus on influencer playlists—meaning, playlists curated by a well-known artist, radio station, DJ, etc.—the application allows you to curate playlists across all music platforms. Whether you’re a musician curating music for your fans, or a rising social media influencer looking to build a following off your playlists, Soundsgood makes curating playlists simple by organizing the process on one platform.
Three men who share diverse backgrounds in the music industry—from Warner Music, to Accenture and Havas Worldwide—founded the company, based in Paris, France. The mission of the company is pretty clear: to make influencers’ playlists universal. Despite launching worldwide this month, Soundsgood has been around in France since November 2014. To date, about 3,900+ leading influencers are using the service.
I don’t exactly consider myself to be an “influencer” when it comes to music, so I was curious to see how the average user might find this useful. I signed up for Soundsgood, started exploring, and quickly learned there are a few key features that make this fun, both for myself and for an influencer. In fact, as I got used to the platform, I could see how this could be totally useful for an influencer looking to engage with their social media audience.
As long as you have a Soundcloud, Deezer, Spotify, and YouTube account, you can automatically publish a playlist across all channels. You don’t need to build an individual playlist for each service—you build it on Soundsgood and sync it among your channels.
When adding a track, I was a bit confused at first because there is a tab for each streaming account where you search the selected service’s library for a song. I was confused, wondering what would happen if a song I wanted to add was not available for one of my channels. But, what’s interesting is that you can make certain tracks not play on one of your channels. If a song were not available on a particular channel, the playlist would still exist, but that one song wouldn’t. Thought I think it would be highly unlikely that you’d run into this issue, given the vast music libraries services like Spotify and YouTube allow you to access.
Moreover, when you’re creating a playlist, you can select tracks you want to play on each channel—so if you didn’t want a particular song to play for your audience on Soundcloud, you wouldn’t select the track for Soundcloud. If you wanted the live version to play on your YouTube channel, you’d select the live version track for that particular channel.
Creating a playlist is actually pretty fun because you can be as detailed as you want to be. You’re given the option to add an image header and profile image; add a title and subtitle; as well as add a description of the playlist. After adding the tracks, you’re able to categorize the playlist by mood, genre and add tags for better SEO. You can even add filters specifying if the playlist is good to listen to while you’re at work, or filter it by whether or not it contains mostly recent or current tracks.
Once you’ve got your playlist ready to go, you select all the channels you want the playlist to be active on. You can even select to make it a public or private player. Hit ‘publish’ and viola! All your social channels are synchronized.
Adding new tracks to a playlist is super easy too. You can easily update any information and sync the playlists across all your channels for an automatic update. Whether you want to change the playlist’s name, add new tracks or reorder it—it saves automatically and updates everywhere.
As all streaming services do, Soundsgood allows you to embed a single-player directly onto your website and social networks. This makes it easy to keep your audience on your actual page. The single-player also has a ‘smart follow’ button feature for collecting new fans and followers right then and there. Additionally, anyone can stream the player and save it to his or her own streaming account.
Though the feature is not yet available, Soundsgood has plans for a built-in analytics tool. This will allow users to read insightful data about their audience for tracking growth and performance. The company also says it’s planning upcoming partnerships with Bandcamp, Rhapsody/Napster, and Microsoft Groove, and more.
I’d like to see the web design and user interface get a makeover, but overall, it’s well organized and I can see how an influencer would find their services useful, especially when the performance-tracking feature launches. If you simply just want to be able to update all your personal playlists at once, Soundsgood is here to make that simple.
