I have said before that [[Sharing Links is My Love Language]], and one of my favorite links to share is music that I think my friends should listen to. That said, music sharing is a bit more involved than the usual deluge of links and art that I throw at my friends. Half of them don’t use the same music service that I do, so sometimes we’re passing things back and forth on YouTube, which isn’t ideal. On top of that it can just be tough to know what your friends might like or loathe. Recently I stumbled across an app that seems to remedy these problems called [Airbuds](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.capp.poplive&hl=en-US). I’ve used it for about a week now after linking up with a few friends on it, and I’ve been enjoying it! Basically the way **Airbuds** works is as a widget you put on your phone after you install it. You connect whatever service you use — Spotify, Apple Music, Soundcloud, etc. — and start listening. Anything you listen to gets shared to Airbuds in real-time, similar to last.fm. Then those tracks get shared to your friends’ widgets. ![[Airbuds is My Ideal Social Music Experience-1758384351168.png]] That’s the main feature, but there’s a bunch of other stuff on top of it. If you see a track you like on the widget, clicking it will take you to the app. ![[Airbuds is My Ideal Social Music Experience-1758384614918.jpg]] Click the speaker and you can get a quick preview snippet of the track your friend’s listening to. You can hit the listen button in the middle to find that track in your preferred music service, leave a reaction, or comment on a track. Like I did after Flynn shamed me for listening to *The Kill (Bury Me)* by Thirty Seconds to Mars. ![[Airbuds is My Ideal Social Music Experience-1758384685867.png]] There’s other cute stuff, like a “Space” where you can add favorite albums, songs and artists, or upload photos or lyrics. It’s fun in a way that reminded me of AOL Status updates or MySpace pages, back when I didn’t have to worry about taxes or the surging rise of fascism. Yay! As you scroll through your feed, you’ll also get cute little alerts when you and a friend listen to the same artist or song, tag a song as a favorite, listen to *Radiant Revival* three times in a week, etc. I’ve had a lot of fun just scrolling through and seeing what my friends are listening to without having to pester them. The app’s not perfect: it’s so obviously targeted towards Gen Z — I could tell when it labeled me as in the top 1% of Daft Punk listeners. This isn’t a negative on its own, but it does do some silly ragebait shit as a result, like tell you that you have basic taste in music because you listen to Carly Rae Jepsen or whatever. It also has nothing in the app that I can pay for, which means it will likely get hit by the [[Enshittification]] beam eventually. But for now I’ve honestly had a ton of fun using **Airbuds**! It’s a passive little social media feed experience that doesn’t fill me with despair like most social media feeds do. The love of music I have is stuffed into every fiber of my being, and I consider listening to it to be one of the core pillars that make me, me. I love finding new artists and albums and sounds that give me goosebumps, or make me want to headbang or jump (or shake some ass, lmao). And I love learning what my friends are listening to! **Airbuds** lets me do that without pestering them and hyping up the stuff they put on my timeline that I end up enjoying. So I’ll be into using it for as long as it continues to be this good. If you’re on it, hit me up so I can add you as a friend and snoop on your library too!