Since its launch in late June last year, Soundwave, the Mark Cuban-backed music discovery app that tracks the listening habits of you, your friends and other users you follow, had at least one gaping omission. It was mobile-only — iOS and Android — meaning that there was no way for the service to track music you consumed on a desktop computer.
For users like me, that rendered Soundwave a little mute since the majority of my music listening takes place on a laptop streamed to my home-office stereo. Today, however, the Dublin-based startup is going someway to fix this. It’s enabled desktop tracking in the form of a Chrome browser extension so that a plethora of desktop web-based music services can send listening data to the Soundwave app.
Specifically, the list of services that the Chrome extension is able to track includes Pandora, Spotify, Deezer, 8tracks, Songza, Rdio, Google Play Music, VK (particularly beneficial for Soundwave’s large Russian user base), India’s Gaana, and Grooveshark.
What’s also notable about the limited desktop tracking support is that it’s strictly one-way. There’s no desktop version of Soundwave itself; this is purely about providing a way to plug desktop web listening data into the service — picking up where the ‘scrobbling’ feature of Last.fm left off, if you will — rather than extending the number of platforms where Soundwave and all of its music discovery and social features can be consumed.
Regarding the latter, Soundwave recently added comments and #hashtags to its mobile apps, as well as Twitter integration so that you can share music discoveries on the social media service.
Of course, just like the recent addition of YouTube tracking, Soundwave’s Chrome extension means it is closer to fulfilling its mission to become the one-stop-shop for tracking your listening habits and in turn helping you discover new music through the listening habits of your friends and influencers you follow. Likewise, it doesn’t harm the company’s Big Data play, either, in which it plans to sell aggregate listening data back to the music industry.
Soundwave is also sharing some updated metrics with TechCrunch. Combining iOS and Android the app has seen over 950,000 downloads — up from 750,000 in December last year. I’m also told that “emerging markets” are proving pretty key for the startup, thus the desktop tracking support for Russia’s VK and India’s Gaana. Soundwave also recently achieved the top music app position in the App store in France, which resulted in 10,000 downloads in a single day. 65 million song plays have been tracked by the app’s users to date.
In addition to Mark Cuban, Soundwave’s backers include ACT Venture Capital, Enterprise Ireland, Matthew Le Merle, and Trevor Bowen, one of the people behind U2′s management company Principle Management. Funding totals $1.5 million.