An intriguing new music discovery app has popped up on Apple’s App Store. It’s called Rewind Radio, and pitches itself as “the world’s first radio time machine” while promising that “music rediscovery is possible”.
The app, which we’ve been playing with this morning, prompts you to choose a decade, a year, or a season (e.g. Winter 1987) and then play music from that period, saving tracks as ‘moments’ for later access.
The caveat is that the music comes in the form of 30-second samples rather than full tracks, with a shopping-cart button to buy them from Apple’s iTunes Store. However, Rewind Radio also has a ‘Listen to Full Songs’ button, which prompts users to enter their Rdio login to stream full tracks via that service.
It’s thus the latest app to be built on Rdio’s platform, with that company competing with Spotify and Deezer to build an ecosystem of mobile app developers. The app is slick, social features are built in too, and the nostalgia angle isn’t one that’s been over-mined by discovery apps in recent times, so feels quite fresh.
Can it cut through the App Store clutter to find an audience, and then find a successful business model? That’s a challenge, as it is for all music apps, so we’ll watch Rewind Radio’s progress carefully.
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Source: Musically (by Stuart Dredge)