Skip to main content

Social entertainment platform Yap releases music app for iPhone

Yap MusicToday, Yap (formerly yap.TV) joins the big leagues of companies promising to deliver a one-of-a-kind music listening experience by launching Yap Music, its second entertainment discovery app after its widely successful Yap TV Guide for television shows and movies. 

Yap is a mobile service known for providing personalized entertainment content – through its exclusive social entertainment algorithm, TV show fans and movie buffs can easily log in with Facebook and Twitter and have their interests automatically taken into account and have them generate relevant, personalized media streams. The company’s platform also powers social entertainment experiences for USA Network and Simon Fuller’s XIX Entertainment. In the same way the Yap TV Guide app provides TV and movie watchers an immersive experience, Yap Music promises to complete the new content discovery package, tying together information from your social media accounts and your iTunes library.

How does it work?

After collecting your Facebook music “likes” and studying your device’s music library, it uses a special discovery and recommendations algorithm and provides you a new list of music artists tailored to your preferences. You can sort content according to popularity, newness, and number of likes received from people in your circle as well as other users on Facebook and iTunes. You can then purchase music from within the app, without losing connection to the artists you adore and enjoy. 

Every artist featured in the Yap Music app gets a personal feed consisting of their pictures, videos, and news. Playback ability is also present within the app.

Yap Music - Artist profile with followers
Image used with permission by copyright holder

Whenever you scroll through a certain musician’s feed, the Contextual iTunes player plays sample tracks in the background, giving you a free taste of the artist’s music as you browse.

Yap Music - Contextual iTunes player
Image used with permission by copyright holder

If you don’t have an artist in mind, you can check out featured artists by genre or use the Search and Discover feature. You can also check out a collective list of artists your friends follow.

Yap Music - Genre
Image used with permission by copyright holder

Yap Music - Search and discoverYap Music - Friends follow

You can visit your friends’ profiles and see which specific artists they like, and you can check out automatic playlists they’ve generated.

Yap Music - Friend profile
Image used with permission by copyright holder

From one page, you can access your feed as well as the Genre filter and the Search and Discover functions. From there you can easily review artists you follow.

Yap Music - User profile main
Image used with permission by copyright holder
Yap Music - User feed
Image used with permission by copyright holder
Yap Music - User profile following
Image used with permission by copyright holder

What’s the difference?

“Many apps claim to deliver ‘music discovery,’ but are in practice just a cleverly disguised trending topic list or skin for existing streaming music apps like Spotify – these approaches fall dramatically short of true discovery,” explains Trevor Stout, Yap CEO. “Yap’s deep integration with Facebook brings a personalized music experience to the fan with a simple log in, making it easy to browse and follow new artists, share favorite artists with friends, discover a great unknown band, or view pictures or videos posted from your favorite bands. Yap creates a universe of musical discovery around the most important person: you.”

Stout says that it is his company’s mission is to deliver users continuous real-time content that maps their interests as well as their friends’ through Yap Music. Right now, the app is only available for iOS devices through the iTunes store, but  an Android app is also in the works. Yap is considering other platforms as well.

Editors' Recommendations

Jam Kotenko
Former Digital Trends Contributor
When she's not busy watching movies and TV shows or traveling to new places, Jam is probably on Facebook. Or Twitter. Or…
X rival Threads could be about to get millions of more users
Instagram Threads app.

Threads -- Meta’s rival to X, formerly Twitter -- has just launched in the European Union (EU), a market with nearly half a billion people.

The app launched in the U.S. to much fanfare in July, with Meta hoping to attract X users disillusioned with the turbulence on the platform since Elon Musk acquired it for $44 billion 14 months ago.

Read more
X (formerly Twitter) returns after global outage
A white X on a black background, which could be Twitter's new logo.

X, formerly known as Twitter, went down for about 90 minutes for users worldwide early on Thursday ET.

Anyone opening the social media app across all platforms was met with a blank timeline. On desktop, users saw a message that simply read, "Welcome to X," while on mobile the app showed suggestions for accounts to follow.

Read more
How to create multiple profiles on a Facebook account
A series of social media app icons on a colorful smartphone screen.

Facebook (and, by extension, Meta) are particular in the way that they allow users to create accounts and interact with their platform. Being the opposite of the typical anonymous service, Facebook sticks to the rule of one account per one person. However, Facebook allows its users to create multiple profiles that are all linked to one main Facebook account.

In much the same way as Japanese philosophy tells us we have three faces — one to show the world, one to show family, and one to show no one but ourselves — these profiles allow us to put a different 'face' out to different aspects or hobbies. One profile can keep tabs on your friends, while another goes hardcore into networking and selling tech on Facebook Marketplace.

Read more