What do a bunch of high schoolers, Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian, and I have in common? We’re all using Airbuds, a social app that connects friends over music.
I’ve been on Airbuds, which launched in 2022, to keep tabs on what my friends are listening to for a little over a year now. The app syncs with my Apple Music — you can also connect it to Spotify, Amazon Music, SoundCloud, and other streamers — and updates a live feed of every song I’ve been playing.
Ohanian is more than a user: His venture capital firm Seven Seven Six led Airbuds’ latest $5 million investment round.
“What I liked about the Airbuds approach was that it didn’t really ask much of a new user,” Ohanian told Business Insider in an interview, adding that the app’s automatic feed provides a sort of passive content for “actual human friends of yours.”
I only follow a handful of friends on Airbuds and will occasionally pop in to see what they’ve been listening to, react to their recent listens with an emoji, or DM them about a song. Unlike other social networks, I’m not having to toil over what to post — the music itself is the content.
However, as an older Gen Z user, I’m not part of the core demographic using the app — nor is Ohanian. Roughly two-thirds of Airbuds’ 5 million monthly active users are under 22 years old, and typically in high school or college, Airbuds CEO Gilles Poupardin told Business Insider.
For the teens using the app, “it’s all about self-expression,” Poupardin said. “Who they’re listening to, what they stream, the artists they love is who they are, and it’s very tied to their personality.”
There’s a deep interest in repackaging the content they consume into shareable data. Think Letterboxd, Goodreads, and the annual Spotify Wrapped.
Dia Dipasupil/Getty Images
One of the most popular features on the app is the weekly recap, similar to Spotify Wrapped, which summarizes users’ top artists, songs, and albums. Updated each Sunday, Poupardin said that the app still sees spikes in new users around this time because people frequently screenshot and share that recap elsewhere.
Typically, people also follow their closest friends, and the median number of followers is 12 to 15, Poupardin said. The app recently added a feature that allows you to join a high school or college community.
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Airbuds is also adding more ways for its users to connect over music, including testing a feature to share playlists, linking superfans with artists, and exploring AI tools that would let users remix songs.
The startup is still early in its monetization efforts and is inking partnerships with record labels as a way to potentially enter the music marketing space (such as promoting new releases from artists within the app’s feed). It’s also in the very early stages of testing a subscription model that would include more customization options, Pourpardin said.
Growing an app and winning over the youth
A key part of why Airbuds has gained traction with Gen Z and Alpha users is because of its “widget” that showcases what friends are listening to on their phone homepage without needing to open the actual app.
Poupardin said he’d noticed widget-style apps were gaining traction among teens a few years ago. After selling his previous social audio app called Cappucino, Poupardin and his cofounder, Gawen Arab, pivoted to building the Airbuds widget.
Courtesy of Airbuds
Other startups, such as photo-sharing app Locket, have also found success with young users by utilizing widgets.
Watching where young users spend their time online is “one of the best bellwethers” for understanding the direction social media is headed, Ohanian said.
Meanwhile, TikTok marketing helped skyrocket the app’s downloads.
While word of mouth now accounts for a majority of Airbuds’ growth, Poupardin said its early traction was largely tied to TikTok.
The app first went viral on TikTok in 2022, he said. The startup later developed a TikTok ambassador program. Airbuds ambassadors, often power users of the app, get paid to post content about Airbuds on platforms like TikTok. The program has around 100 ambassadors, Pourpardin said.
The long game for any app: retention
Virality and growth are great, but what’s even more important — especially to investors — is an app’s ability to retain those users.
Airbuds has been downloaded over 15 million times, with 1.5 million users opening it daily, according to the company.
“You need to show you have hundreds of thousands … millions of users, and also long-term retention, which is the right spot to have a chance to build the next generational company in this space,” Poupardin said. “Which is what we’re shooting for.”
Airbuds
Aiming to be one of the next big apps means competing with giants that are already playing in this pool. Spotify has been adding more social features (like DMs), and even Instagram has added music-sharing features, including a way to share songs as a status via its Notes feature.
“As a startup, you’re very vulnerable because all of the big guys can eat your lunch and kill you,” Pourpardin said.
Other startups are also trying to crack the social music category, such as Superfan, Hangout, and Soundmap. Last.fm, which has been around for over 20 years, similarly tracks what people are listening to and helps them discover new music.
To date, Airbuds has raised $10.2 million, and in addition to Ohanian’s 776, has gotten investments from A16z and angels like Nikita Bier (who’s now leading product at X).
Investors like Ohanian see Airbuds as having a shot despite competition from heavyweights.
“The most potent form of social today is basically in group chats, which is obviously not new technology, but what it’s highlighting is the fact that that’s a trusted group of people who you actually know, who are verifiably human,” Ohanian said. “This next wave of apps — Airbuds is a great example — is going to be about that.”
