The Best Apps for Throwing Your Online Music Party JQBX Is the Best App for Sharing with Friends Who Pay for Streaming If you have a particular group of devoted friends who already pay for either of the two most popular streaming apps, JQBX will fit your needs. The catch is it only works with Spotify Premium. The upshot of this is that musicians get paid for every listener in the room. The downside is that your friends who don’t pay for music streaming won’t be able to participate (there is a hack for this at the end of the article). WHY JQBX STANDS OUT JQBX is the best app to use if you have meticulous playlist needs, especially if you’ve already built those playlists in Spotify. Not only can you queue up your existing Spotify playlists, but you can also edit your song queue more efficiently because the JQBX playlist is saved in Spotify. For example, say people are starting to dance but your dancey tracks are mixed throughout your queue. The Spotify desktop app allows you to cut
and paste sections of any playlist. So you could cut and paste the dancey songs in your JQBX Queue playlist into Spotify. Save, refresh the queue, jump back into JQBX, and all your dance songs will be at the top. Additionally, JQBX has the best interface. You get to choose custom images that show when you upvote or downvote tracks. A light indicates if audience members have been recently active (helpful to get a sense of who in the room might be away from their screen). A tab shows the history of tracks recently played in that room so you can get a feel for what to play. People share animated gifs in the chat and rooms can have a promo image and a website link. The chat is timestamped with the titles of songs, so when someone in chat says “this is my favorite,” you know which song they were referring to. There are more options for defining rooms, such as having a multitude of moderators or limits to the number of DJs. JQBX is available for iOS, macOS, Android, and even as a web app. The latter is important because it allows your friends to take a peek at what JQBX is about without having to
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