Soundwave’s most recent update focuses on the social aspects of music

Soundwave, the app designed for sharing your music taste, is today receiving its biggest update since it launched 13 months ago. While Soundwave 1.0 was a good sketch of what Last.fm might be like if it had been developed a decade later, a year on the app has matured into something far more fully-formed. The key new feature here is a Music Messenger that is essentially ‘group messaging with music”. You can create and join as many groups as you like, inviting existing Soundwave contacts, SMS or email. In addition to group IM you get a shared playlist that any member can add songs to it. Whether you use it for groups of friends with a shared music taste, a trip to a music festival or just for sharing songs with people you’ve met online, Music Messenger certainly adds a whole new dimension to Soundwave as a product.

Soundwave, the mobile app that tracks the listening habits of you, your friends and other users you follow, to help you discover more and better music, is rolling out a significant update today that sees it manoeuvre to try to become the ‘water cooler’ of what people are listening to right now. It’s doing this via a raft of new social features, specifically the ability to create ad-hoc private messaging groups where you can discuss and share music with friends, regardless of which service it originates from. The update also potentially pits Soundwave against behemoths like Facebook, which recently rolled out Facebook Audio ID (a feature similar to music recognition app Shazam), in an attempt to build on the social network as the place to congress virtually around music. We’ve also seen Twitter’s failed attempt to become music’s water cooler, and there are countless startups trying to conquer this space, such as France’s Whyd, to name but one. However, Soundwave’s core technology — the ability to track what are you listening to across multiple services and multiple platforms — is where it thinks it has the edge. “Now that we’ve got the smart tech in place, we’re in a great position to really start iterating on top,” co-founder and CEO Brendan O’Driscoll tells me. “There’s a huge opportunity that only we can unlock to be the one place where everyone can congregate to chat and share what music they are listening to, agnostic of device, music player, or streaming service.”