Two Boston College dropouts are aiming to build a more social, smoother music sharing experience. Co-founders Kam Bain and Henri Liriani, along with the other four members of their team, just launched Craaave, an iOS app that lets you pass along your favorite songs to friends across multiple free and subscription music applications, like Spotify and Rdio.
Bain, a Los Angeles native, had been studying information systems at Boston College – with an eclectic mix of Spotify playlists spinning in the background, of course. But last October, when he wanted to share some of those same songs with friends who didn’t happen to use the same music streaming service, he hit a wall.
“I was frustrated with how difficult it was to send Henri [Liriani] a song because I used Spotify and he used Rdio. We knew there had to be a better way to exchange music with friends across multiple platforms,” Bain told BostInno. So, the pair of entrepreneurial students sought out to create a solution.
In the middle of the first semester of their junior year, the duo made the decision to put their education on pause and pursue the project full-time. Bain began immersing himself in the overlap between the music and tech markets and industries. When it came to the initial tech and design, Liriani took the reins. A self-taught UX/UI designers, Liriani was tapped by Microsoft while still in high school to create icons for Microsoft Office for Mac in 2011 and, more recently, Microsoft OneNote. Using Boston as their home-base, Bain and Liriani bounced around to local companies like Spotify-acquired Echo Nest to participate in music-themed hack days and to neighboring New York City to plan out their next steps. Soon, they found Mark Gaensicke, who produced Japanese, the most successful Japanese dictionary app, to head up their development full-time as Craaave’s third co-founder and CTO.
Craaave, which is available for free on the App Store starting Friday, syncs to the top music libraries and streaming services, including iTunes, Spotify, Soundcloud, Deezer and Rdio, to let people send songs to friends either through your phone’s Contacts list or through Facebook. When a song is shared, a user will be able to listen to the full-length track or, at the very least, a 30-second preview via iTunes, Bain explained. (The sender can also see which of his friends he sent the song to have actually played it). When connected with a streaming service, users can also save songs received directly into their preferred music library. What’s more, Craaave also includes a Shazaam-esque feature; with one touch, the app’s microphone picks up on what music is playing in a given area, and pulls the song and artist information. Plus, it's all legal, via partnerships with the music companies, according to Bain.
"We've basically created a resolution engine. When you send a song via Spotify to someone using Rdio, [Craaave] reads the meta data – the song name, the artist name – and sends a package of links via Rdio, Soundcloud and iTunes, and shoots that out," shared Bain.
Since its humble start last fall, Craaave has grown its team to six, and relocated to San Francisco’s Mission District.
