Use the Earbuds App to Share Songs Between Spotify and Apple Music
Have you ever wanted to share a song or playlist with a friend or group online, only to find that they subscribe to Apple Music and you subscribe to Spotify? Earbuds, an app for iPhone and Android, breaks down those walls so music lovers can share whatever they want.
“The average Gen Z user shares three to five songs per week with their friends, and the vast majority use screenshots,” says Jason Fox, founder and CEO of EarBuds. “They say: “Here is a screenshot, you can figure it out for yourself.” But the problem is that the recipient has to put in a lot of effort. They have to search for the song manually. If they’re in a meeting, if they’re busy or at dinner, if they can’t listen to the song right then and there, it’s gone with the wind.”
Earbuds let you set up chats in which links from Spotify are automatically clickable for Apple Music users and vice versa, freeing the two services from their walled gardens. Links can also be played from headphones.
How to Share Music Between Spotify and Apple Music Using the Earbuds App
Here are step-by-step instructions for using headphones to share music between Apple Music and Spotify.
- Download the Earbuds app from the App Store or Google Play .
- Create an account.
- After installing the program, click “Groups”.
- Click the “+” sign in the top right corner for “create group.”
- Search for your friends by name or click the Invite button and Earbuds will send a link so people can get started.
Once your friend (or 845 Instagram followers) is in the same Earbuds chat, you can copy links to playlists or songs from your music service, and they will appear as links to other users’ platforms. For now, it only works on Apple Music and Spotify, but there are plans to expand the service to the five largest music streaming platforms.
Most Apple Music and Spotify catalogs match, but if they don’t, Earbuds will try to find the closest one, possibly linking to a different version of the same song. “If a song is unavailable one in 1,000 times, we notify the user and say, ‘Hey, this song is unavailable.’ But here’s another one that’s very close,” Fox said.
How to Use the AI Earbuds Search Bar to Find New Music
In addition to breaking the barrier between music services, Earbuds includes an artificial intelligence search bot called “earbot” that uses ChatGPT 4 to provide song and playlist recommendations, allowing you to go beyond the same old algorithms that provide suggestions on Spotify and Apple Music. It also compiles them into a playlist for you.
The idea, Fox said, is to bring back the “record store culture” that technology has destroyed. Fox says AI could provide the modern equivalent of “talking to friends and asking salespeople.” “Hey man, what’s new? What should I listen to?
Music services like Spotify usually do a good job of creating playlists of songs that are similar to another song, or lists of music close to what you already like, but if you want to get more esoteric, there’s not much you can do. But AI offers endless possibilities for music discovery. For example, I asked Erbot, “If I were a suburban housewife in 1979 and newly divorced, what songs would make me feel hopeful for the future rather than depressed about the end of my marriage?” Playlist:
- Diana Ross: “I’m Coming Out”
- Fleetwood Mac: “Go your own way”
- Aretha Franklin “I’ve Never Loved a Man (The Way I Love You)”
- Carole King: “I Feel the Earth Moving”
- Gloria Gaynor: “I will survive”
I couldn’t have done better myself.