Related Articles
Screenshot by Luke Westaway/CNET
Nascent music service Bop.fm has landed on iOS, giving owners of Apple’s glossy technology a chance to test out the platform-agnostic streaming tool.
Bop.fm aims to capitalise on the fact that many artists or particular songs are only available on certain services — see Taylor Swift’s recent high-profile exodus from Spotify, for instance. Bop.fm, which claims to have logged 50 million song plays, lets you circumvent this by pulling in streams from a clutch of different services, including Spotify, YouTube and SoundCloud.
Songs from different services can be organised into playlists too, theoretically making it simple to queue up the songs you like without having to fish around on different sites to find them. Bop.fm also provides songs with a permanent listening link, so regardless of changes of online availability, the same single link will retrieve all the remaining legal listening options.
The iOS app, which is available to download today, puts the service on your Apple device, promising a “Facebook-like” news feed for music, and recommendations based on your streaming history. One proviso, however, is that you’ll need to have the Spotify app installed on your iOS device (and a premium subscription) in order to play any tunes that draw from Spotify’s archive.
For Bop.fm, the mobile element brings the start-up onto an essential platform for anybody fiddling in digital music. Mobile options are the most popular way people listen to streaming music today. For example, on US-based Pandora — the Internet’s number one source of streaming music by users — 84 percent of total music hours are via mobile platforms.
There’s no Android version currently, but Bop.fm tells me that it’s “in the works,” so fans of Google’s green robot should stay tuned.
Bop.fm is available globally, and makes money every time it refers its customers to online streaming services or digital music downloads. Longer-term, Bop.fm is planning on generating cash from the data it accrues, though says its focusing on user experience rather than money, for now.
CNET’s Joan E. Solsman contributed to this report.
