Imagine if you could experience a short trailer of a song before listening to the whole track and deciding whether you like it enough to add it to your library. Humit, a social music discovery app is doing exactly this. It was launched in March 2021 by three BITS Pilani graduates who finally worked on their campus idea after keeping it in the cold storage for nearly four years. Rohit Ganapathy, Prithvi Shankar and Ishaan Negi often discussed how music is intrinsically social. “But, we realised that streaming services were fundamentally designed for private listening. We thought a social music discovery platform was needed,” says Shankar. In 2018, they shelved the idea believing that a mega tech firm would be better equipped to work on it. But, once again in 2020, chatter around the idea grew when they saw how streaming platforms had gradually begun opening their Application Programming Interface (APIs) through which a third party platform could directly integrate and access their entire catalogue of music free of cost. “So, this meant that we didn’t have to worry about licensing content. On the other hand, there was a rapid wave of short form content and audio as a format,” adds Shankar. He explains that social media apps are built fundamentally around an individual’s social graphs and one is likely to know the other person and will want to consume content shared by them. However, COVID led a trend of vertical social media platforms that cater to interests rather than social graphs. “Think of Humit as the lovechild of Reddit and Spotify.”

Lishash, founded by Shashwat Singhal and Tanya Desai is another vertical social music discovery app that focuses on building technology with harmony both, in real life and digital. It is a community of music lovers. Social media discovery is a broad term, according to Singhal. It can mean discovering music solo or listening to music with other people, or even broadcasting and sharing music on Reddit and on other platforms. “Our take on social music discovery is to club all of this together into a holistic social music experience,” says Singhal. The idea for the app was born in 2018 when he came up with an emotion detection hardware setup while studying in UCLA. The idea evolved from this hardware device to intimate house concerts, music sharing, a discord community to finally listening to music together online via the Lishash app. The app was launched towards the end of 2019 and still remains an invite-only platform. This is to ensure that they build a strong initial community of music lovers, which is not only wholesome, but also inclusive. Based on the responses offered by users, the team decides whether 
to include the person in the community or not.