The Messaging market is pretty saturated right now — between Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, and Google’s innumerable messaging apps, there are plenty of ways to get in touch with your friends. That, however, has not stopped the creators of online collaboration website Soundslates from coming up with Bars, a new messaging platform that uses song lyrics to communicate.
The premise is really quite simple — you chat with your friends as your normally would, however you can quickly add song lyrics to your messages through the smart algorithm, which recognizes text as lyrics. You only need to type out a few of those lyrics in order for a song to be recognized, and the app will then show you a list of songs the lyrics could possibly derive from. Choose the right song, hit send, and the receiver of the text can view the entire song lyrics as well as hear a preview of the song itself.
“This all started between me and my brother. As we would text and talk everyday, we would send each other lyrics over and over again. That’s where this idea came from,” said Pierre Seylan, co-founder of Bars, in an email to Digital Trends. “We decided to put what we had going on hold , and go through with this idea. What we wanted to try and do was to reinvent casual texting.”
Of course, Bars isn’t the only musical messaging platform out there — it seems like every year a new one pops up only to be quickly forgotten. Last year, for example, we got Rithm, aimed at speeding up musical recommendation. So what does Bars offer that other messaging apps don’t?
“Bars has a catalog of songs containing over 1M songs. We also came up with a lyric search system which enables even the most novice music fans to find bars through our database,” continued Seylan in this email. “We plan on adding many features which we believe will turn this app into the go-to music lovers app.”
It’s hard to imagine Bars, like other messaging apps, capturing the same user base as the likes of Facebook Messenger — but it’s not hard to imagine it gaining some die-hard fans. Bars is available on iOS now, with an Android version coming soon.