cubic.fm is a music discovery platform, bringing the “social” to music, and boosting it with game mechanics.

Today, 1 billion people listen to music online, they share and like songs. Huge data! But somehow, even though we have this massive data at hand,we cannot effectively make sense of it to solve the popular problem of music discovery.
 
And why are we stuck this way?

Because we have an excessive fragmentation in the digital music market.

We pay for on-demand services like Spotify, Deezer, Rdio to listen to unlimited music,

To discover music, we use Pandora, Lastfm, Songza and even terrestrial radio.

And to share a discovery with friends, we search for Youtube and Soundcloud links, and paste them on facebook… We feel this to be bullshit :)

 
To effectively solve the problem of music discovery, we need to eliminate this scary fragmentation among different streaming services, so that people -no matter which service they subscribe to- are able to share tastes with each other, and seamlessly discover people with similar tastes.This social interaction calls for a social feed, the key to active music discovery.


But sharing on its own is never a complete experience even though many other products focus on this. In a world where 48% of music is discovered through radio, it is too optimistic to expect people to discover only through a feed. Learning from what Pandora and Songza shown us, in the context of music discovery, what works is listening, not scrolling through a feed. Radio is still the most important element of music discovery, and should never be undervalued.

 
cubic.fm was born through all these realizations.

 
Users can login with their Spotify, Deezer, Rdio ID’s or simply via Facebook.

 
And, we welcome them with a selection of activities that fit the weather and the current time at their location. Once a user specifies an activity and a genre, he will reach a perfectly fitting radio station, in only 2 clicks.

 
And this is where the magic starts. When listening to a radio station, cubic.fm lets you discover songs and people! This is because our radio streams are made up of songs that cubic.fm users share, or as we call it “cube” within the platform.
 

With our unique algorithm, we categorize every cubed song based on its genre, tempo, energy level and many other data points, and form radio stations to fit a specific activity or mood, such as reading or feeling melancholic.

 
As you listen to a song, you see who cubed it. Thanks to gamification, you can see their listening and sharing habits, which genres they listen to and their mastery levels. You can decide to follow them to enjoy your dose of music discovery in your personal feed, just like on twitter.

 
You can further interact with feed items: like, recube or comment.

 
We are pretty ambitious on this one, sharing & discovering music has never been so simple and comprehensive!

Light version (Radio stations and minimum set of social features)  is now available on Deezer and Spotify.

Deezer : http://bit.ly/HYX0yX
Spotify: http://spoti.fi/Li33zS

Our latest version, in which we are testing social features and game mechanics, is now on private beta. Leave your e-mail address on cubic.fm. We ll let you know when it is your turn to become an early cuber!

Best,

Onur

Via Clio // Mnémosia