The next time you want to have a silent dance party — one that lets you and all your friends listen to the same music at the same time for better choreographed routines — you may want to check out Vertigo. The new app understands the transcendent power of music, and what better way to connect with your friends across the world (or across the room) than by sharing a tune? Vertigo lets you share your music with one person, a group of people, or the public in real-time so that they’re listening to exactly what you’re listening to. Not just the same song, but the exact same second of the same song.
With $10 million in funding under its belt, Vertigo clearly has proven its potential to investors. And much of that potential, founder Greg Leekley says, lies in millennials and Generation Z.
“The young demographic doesn’t separate what happens in their virtual lives from what happens in the real world,” Leekley said in an interview with TechCrunch. “And when we asked them, they were more interested in hearing songs that their friends were listening to than celebrities.”
It seems that Leekley is looking to tap into our sense of FOMO by ensuring that we’re never really missing out, and can always share what our friends are experiencing aurally. After all, Leekley noted, that’s what makes Snapchat so successful — it’s empowered young users to live life with one another as it happens.
There are, in fact, Snapchat-esque features available in Vertigo. Not only can you listen to music with your friends, you can also superimpose text, video, and pictures onto your audio files, allowing users to curate and personalize their experiences a bit more.
So how does it work? Right now, Vertigo connects with Spotify Premium accounts (so yeah, you’ll have to have one of those in order to use the app) in order to avoid legal SNAFUs, and allows users to share songs that all parties already have access to. In the future, however, Vertigo hopes that it might partner with other music platforms as well.
