[App Fridays] This audio-focused social media app lets you discover and like music from across genres

Ever since the rise of audio streaming apps, India has witnessed a boom in audio consumption across podcasts, audiobooks, original audio series, talk shows, etc., over the last two years. Various reports estimate that India has 150 million daily listeners.

One of the defining trends in the audio-streaming sector is community engagement, which has accelerated apps like the adoption of apps like Leher and Clubhouse and has led to the creation of Twitter Spaces.

Riding on the wave is homegrown social music app Humit, which has recently raised its pre-seed round led by Antler India, with participation from First Cheque and prominent angel investors.

The app makers say that music sharing on mobile is broken — sharing a URL through Facebook/Messenger/Instagram Stories/WhatsApp means jumping between apps, and there's often no feedback on whether someone liked the song or not. On the other hand, algorithmic recommendations just suggest songs that are extremely similar to your playlist. This is what Humit is trying to fix.

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Founded in 2020 by BITS Pilani graduates Rohit Ganapathy, Prithvi Sankar, and Ishaan Negi, Humit provides an audio-focused social media experience for Spotify users, with integrations across Apple Music, YouTube Music, and SoundCloud currently in the works.

Humit is available on Google Play Store as well as Apple’s App Store, with a rating of 4.5-5 stars by users who are loving its novel concept.

We decided to take a look, and here are our first impressions.

Let's get started!

The UI of the app is kept dark, enabling users to browse through the music in the dark, without straining the eyes, and gives a feel that it caters to a niche audience of music lovers.

Users can log in/sign-up on the app using their Spotify account. The sign-up process requires profile creation, where you share your name, create a handle, and enter your birthday and an optional invite code.

To start using the app, users need to choose three or more stations based on their interests, such as hard rock, heavy metal, indie pop, Bollywood, six strings, and so on. Based on this, your home screen will be curated with a music selection.

The home screen is like that of any other social media timeline, with posts replaced by music. And like Facebook or Twitter, you can like or comment on the post. Once you play a song, it auto-plays to the next music. However, you can turn off this feature.

The songs on the timeline are snippets and not the complete track. If you like the song, you can tap it and can listen to the full song on Spotify. At present, it is only integrated with Spotify. However, going forward, the app plans to bring Apple Music, YouTube Music, and SoundCloud on the platform.

Share with others

In Humit, you can follow users, make friends, and exchange music playlists. If you want to share your own playlists or music, all you have to do is press the ‘plus’ sign at the bottom of the homepage, and you will see your own favourite songs from Spotify.

You can tap the song, and select the best 30 seconds to post on your timeline. Also, if you are listening on Spotify, you can share the snippet from the Spotify app itself.

Unlike music streaming platforms that use AI tools to recommend songs, Humit relies on a community-driven approach, where music is discovered and shared on user moderated channels called ‘stations’. The platform is home to over 500 stations created by users across 42 countries.

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The verdict

Humit aims to disrupt audio-focused social media platforms. Like how Instagram disrupted photo sharing on social media apps, Humit may do the same to music sharing.

What the app is successful at is decoding the nuances of sharing music recommendations with friends, and letting music lovers build friendships by discovering each other’s music stations.

While browsing the app, we were left wondering why music makers cannot share their creation on the platform. However, Humit is an app for music sharing and discovery social media, and does not work like a typical music streaming app.

The concept is new, and music is something that everyone listens to in some form or the other.

We would recommend music lovers to try this app out if you are bored of your own playlists and are tired of having the same kind of songs recommended over and over again.