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SongPop Takes App World By Storm
- Published on Wednesday, 18 July 2012 12:19
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FreshPlanet’s music quiz app, which allows users to challenge their friends’ musical knowledge, has been consistently rising in popularity since its release in early May.
The app allows users to connect with their friends through Facebook or by entering their email address or username, or they can choose to challenge players they don’t know by choosing the random option. The game plays a short music clip, while displaying four potential artists or song titles relating to that clip. Users have to select the correct artist or title as quickly as possible, while ensuring the answer they select is the correct one. After selecting the answers to five musical clips, they then challenge friends to beat their score. Each game played earns coins which allow users to buy more playlists, meaning they can tailor the game to play their favourite genre of music. The available playlists span sixty years of music and a host of genres, making the game appropriate to people of all ages.
The app has gone from strength to strength, being commended by many for its use of the open graph which allows the app to be integrated on the Facebook website, making it accessible to those without smartphones. Even Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg has admitted his love for the app, saying, “SongPop is one of the most fun Facebook games I’ve played in a while,” a quote which led to a huge leap in the app’s popularity. At the time of writing, SongPop boasts 2,400,000 daily active users and a whopping 9,000,000 monthly active users according to AppData, which is still rising despite the app being released two months ago. These figures suggest that SongPop is likely to be more than a passing craze, much like similar apps such as Draw Something.
In a statement about the success of his invention, FreshPlanet’s co-founder and CEO Mathieu Nouzareth said, “It is a very good surprise, as we were able to top the natural virality of the game, as well as taking advantage of open graph on the mobile and PC platform. We knew from the beginning that the game would be good and have a lot of potential, but until you launch and see people playing, it is hard to predict a success.” Julien Codorniou, head of platform partnerships at Facebook, explained that the app’s success is based on several of the elements that make it deeply social. “SongPop uses the open graph to make it easy for players to share activity and help their friends discover music. The app publishes a variety of meaningful actions like “guessed”, “won” and “achieved”, which help it grow quickly through newsfeed, ticker and timeline. These actions are central to the game play, they’re things people are happy to show off on their timeline, and they’re interesting to those people’s friends.”
In my opinion, as someone who is a massive fan of music and used to play “Spot the Intro” on long car rides, I adore the game. My sister and I are extremely competitive about our musical knowledge and are regularly introducing each other to new music, so she was the first person I played against. I would like to see an option on the app to add a comment at the end of each round, and I also think the option to download the songs is fantastic, as it’s a great way to introduce people to new music or remind them of classics they forgot about long ago. For me, this app is definitely a 10 out of 10, but I do agree that unless there are constant updates, SongPop will be a distant memory in six months’ time.
Have you played SongPop? What do you think of the app? Let us know your review of the game in the comments below.
