commit to installing an app. BeatSense Is the Best App for Building a Music Sharing Community If you want to widen your community beyond paid Spotify customers, BeatSense is another great option for music sharing with your friends. Like the other apps, you create a room with a defined genre theme and you and your friends can take turns selecting the music. Rather than using Spotify, BeatSense allows you to import playlists from YouTube. Because the music is coming from YouTube, a video player fills the center of the screen. Thus you get to watch music videos. The YouTube library is very different from Spotify Premium. There are many rarities on YouTube that can’t be found on streaming apps, but the quality is often lower. Having YouTube as the music source affects the app’s function too. Since most people’s YouTube playlists are made up of non-music videos, it makes sense that BeatSense allows you to organize crates of songs. This feature wouldn’t make sense on JQBX, because the Spotify playlist features are all you need. But for most people, creating extensive YouTube music playlists would clutter their YouTube experience, so all that is created within BeatSense. You can easily import a YouTube playlist into BeatSense “crates.” I did find their queue manager more awkward than that of JQBX. You can select songs and move them to the top of the queue, but after each song, it jumps back to the top, which means a lot of scrolling. Despite having a web app, the queue is just as tiny as it would be on mobile—and there’s no scroll wheel. I was able to navigate the queue by clicking on any song and using arrows or Page Up and Page Down. You also can’t grab songs and move them around manually. WHAT SETS BEATSENSE APART If the interface isn’t as good, why
recommend it? The reason is that music sharing is best when your friends join you, and BeatSense makes that easier than their competitors. The BeatSense developers put the music at the forefront, and this gives you an advantage when trying to grow your community. For example, the other apps allow you to share your room, which results in your Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram friends getting an ad for an app—not very inviting. Whereas in BeatSense, when you share the room on external social platforms, it shows you an image and title of the song that was playing at that time. You can also share individual songs, and they can be played without forcing the person to install anything. Friends are more likely to click on a song than an ad for an app, and you’re more likely to share if your posts are about music, rather than spamming your friends to join your channel. The social share has a web player and pulls from YouTube, so your friends can listen without signing up. BeatSense also has the most expanded gamification system. You get points for logging in daily and the system keeps track of—and gives kudos for— songs that have never been played on BeatSense before. Every room auto- generates a list of the top DJs and most-popular songs for that channel. BeatSense jumps into the chat with little facts about the songs that are being played. All these things get people excited to want to share and participate more. Finally, BeatSense has the most active support of all the music apps. I can’t stress how important this is. On a site in active development, people have faith that if features are lacking it is just a matter of time before they get them because the experience is actively being improved. A real person responds to feature request emails, and they take them seriously. The community feels heard and supported and that makes them more likely to
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