For Marc Frankel, building an app that helps connect people through shared music started as a “pure-joy bringing” project.
The idea for SameTunes was born while Frankel was pursuing a business degree and computer science minor at Georgia Tech. “I was talking to a friend and we were throwing out different musical artists asking ‘have you heard of this one? What about this one?’ We were just brute-forcing it. And something in that moment just clicked for me, and I thought this is insanely inefficient.”
SameTunes was designed to help compare…and ultimately find commonality…between people’s music-streaming libraries. “The core idea is that the platform shows you that you have more in common, musically, than you think.”
Users can easily see what artists they have in common with someone else and discover new music through features like “Friend Tunes Weekly,” which curates unknown top music from compatible friends.
“Initially, we pitched ourselves as an API someone like Tinder or Bumble could use to help tell people who were swiping how musically-compatible they were,” said Frankel. While the team received buzz from places like MTV for the idea of making music streaming more social, Frankel said that he started to see “[music] compatibility not as the end, but as the means to an end.”
For Frankel, that means ultimately helping up-and-coming artists connect and grow a fan base in the ultra-competitive music streaming business while giving users new ways to discover music.
For Frankel, Atlanta offers some unique opportunities for growing a MusicTech platform. “What’s special about musicians from Atlanta is that a lot of them are self-made. A lot of them really bootstrapped it all the way to the top, and that really resonates with us. We want to help musicians coming out of a place like Atlanta.”
Along with Frankel, the SameTunes team currently includes co-founders Bonnie Sun and David Yap.
The team expanded last summer while going through Georgia Tech’s Create-X 2020 cohort. For Frankel, the Create-X program helped the team start to think critically about how to build and retain customers in the MusicTech space.
They are working on closing their pre-seed round and making the app platform-agnostic by incorporating other music streaming options.
