[App Fridays] I like to Groovit! Or do I?

As a music buff, I love sharing songs I listen to. Getting friends to listen to a song they just heard is a music lovers way of finding people with similar taste of music.

Before the advent of the smartphone and internet technologies, we shared music on a word of mouth basis. Now using social media, you can share it straight from your device, to all your friends.

The smartphone is also becoming the primary music player for most of its users. Given the connectivity technology that a smartphone has, the number of people you can share your music with will increase multifold. Add music streaming applications to the concoction and the you can share your music preferences to the world - you can now find people all over the world with similar musical tastes.

But what about the music stored locally on your phone? You could upload it to a cloud storage service and share it with everyone you know, but that again is cumbersome.

Based out of Bangalore, Prasad Bhat, SkullNCode & Intermedia Softech have come up with a neat app called Groovit, helps pick the song on your phone, finds the corresponding YouTube link and shares that with your social network

Confused? Read on to know more -

What is it about?

Groovit, in its current form, helps you share music stored locally on your phone, by finding a video of a song on YouTube and posts it to Facebook and

Twitter. It is available for the Windows and Android platforms.It works in two ways:

• When your default music player is on, Groovit can identify the song currently playing and pull up the relevant video from YouTube, ready to be posted on your social networks.
• When your music player isn’t playing, you can use Groovit to choose a song from your music library, and it will pull up the relevant video for you to share.

Very simple, but not simple enough

Simplicity in mobile apps is a plus. With Groovit, it has brought down video sharing on social networks down to a maximum of 2 clicks, which in itself is a cool thing. The engineering behind finding the right YouTube video match for a song, which is accurate for the most part, also works very well.

But beyond a point, the limited functions on the app doesn’t help in Groovit’s stickiness. The real problem, however is having to open the app to use it. After some time, one would forget about the app. Here are some ways which can help Groovit stick better -

• If Groovit prompted the user to share a song, more people would click it.
• A Groovit plugin for music players might work as well, as most offline music players don’t have an online sharing option.

Groovit has done well in doing one thing and doing it well, but the makers of the app might need to think of better ways to ensure user engagement.

Pros and Cons

Groovit facilitates online engagement for offline music content stored locally on your mobile phone. Now that is new and pretty cool. Groovit also scores a perfect ten in terms of intuitiveness and simplicity. Using this app is going to be really easy for a first time user.

When put under the scanner, Groovit had some UX flaws. Having facebook and twitter login at the end of the workflow didn’t work for me. Being redirected to a webpage to login just worsens the new user experience. Using the Twitter and Facebook SDK in the app can make login a one click process (In fact, login screens featured as number 2 on our list of things that will piss off a smartphone user). Ads, which is their monetization model, are badly placed.

While the app has solved the mass sharing problem, it has overlooked personal sharing. An email, message on Facebook

or DM on twitter is a good to have. Given the crowded feeds that most users have on these social networks, there is a good chance that a Groovit post might get lost.Furthermore, the sharing mechanism for Groovit is a YouTube link. If this can be expanded to other music streaming services, it will be a great addition. A tie-up with spotify, for example, Groovit can share a spotify link for a song on your phone.

Our Take

Overall, Groovit is a good app. The endeavor to fix something, no matter how small a problem it is, has touched the geek in me.

Having said that, such apps have very little avenues to monetize. If one were to start up with this app, they’d have a lot of work to do before they could get to building a business around it. My two cents - it either needs to integrate with other music players, or become a music player itself.

Groovit is a decent hack, but a long way away from being a complete app, let alone a business.

Download Groovit for Windows, Android and iPhone.