Revibe: A Pandora/Spotify Hybrid For EDM Music
By Eliot Van Buskirk of Evolver.fm.
Please pardon the repetition in the headline, because EDM means “Electronic Dance Music,” but it’s important to understand that we’re talking about a music service here – and that this one is for EDM.
EDM is huge right now. If you want to hear entire sets of music, which is arguably the best way to hear EDM outside of a club, SoundCloud and MixCloud are good places to look, but they don’t let you build your own sets. Revibe lets you choose any songs in its handpicked catalog, and turn them into a DJ set of sorts. Recognizing that fans of EDM have their own specific needs, Revibe offers the following tools that you won’t find in Pandora or any of the usual streaming music apps:
- Automixer: It “beatmatches the transitions between all tracks and makes a playlist sound like a DJ set.”
- Manual mixer: “For the user who wants to go a step further, Revibe includes a two-channel DJ mixer that can be used to mix tracks manually.”
The result: a Pandora/Spotify hybrid that’s only for EDM music — it tells you the BPM of each track in your playlist, on top of the simple mixing features. For now, it’s only available in Sweden, Denmark, Finland, and Norway, having launched in the last three countries last week.
Revibe.fm (also available for iOS and Android) is free for 30 days; after that it costs 5 Euro per month, which is another thing that places it between Pandora and Spotify, business-model-wise if not music-wise. The Sweden-based company’s main focus is on continuing to sign agreements with record companies to increase the size of its handpicked catalog, whose emphasis is on being “the first to gather and highlight hard-to-find and underexposed electronic music in one place.”
“The electronic music scene is extremely big. EDM is pop music’s trendiest acronym and the underground scene is also growing,” reads the announcement (.pdf). “Our aim is to become more than just a streaming service, where the DJ tools and a Nordic launch are just one step on the road. We will expand the service with more unique functionality and release it on additional markets outside the Nordic countries.”
Other countries are on the roadmap — first in Europe, and then, possibly, stateside.
“The UK, Netherlands, Germany are our main targets,” Revibe designer and founder Johan Wallberg told Evolver.fm via email. “We are also eyeing for the U.S.”
(Screenshot courtesy of Revibe.fm)
