Dying to share that new jam with your friend through your Viberchat? Well it’s your lucky day. As of right now, over one billion Rakuten Viber users can now access, share and play Akazoo music and radio streaming, globally, through their messaging platform.

Viber users will be able to search, access, play and jointly listen to music playlists, stations, curated by Akazoo’s proprietary music A.I, and participate in live listening rooms. Access will be available in-app, directly from within Viber messenger and will be offered as an extension of the chat functionality.

The Social Music Landscape

It is well-known that both social media and music streaming have seen incredible growth over the last decade. However, the two have rarely been combined.

Despite the reign of social media, at the beginning of 2019, the music streaming industry still looked decidedly unsocial - Which is strange when considering that music is a universal, human experience geared to strengthen social bonds, transcend cultural boundaries and expresses our identity.

Looking to the past, people shared tunes through handmade mixtapes often taking days or weeks to put together. Flash forward five years and we were still filtering through Lime wire to copy pirated songs onto CDs for friends. Even as recent as the beginning of 2019, instead of collecting song finds from friends and peers, much of our music is chosen by distant, editorial teams and platform algorithms.

A New Social Era

At beginning of 2020, pioneering music-sharing and messaging apps are working to bring back the human aspect of music sharing and discovery.For example, Akazoo - a leading global on-demand music streaming platform – is at the forefront of the movement thanks to its partnership with international instant messaging chat and voice over IP platform, Rakuten Viber. The two companies have teamed up to bring this social element back to the music experience.

Through this collaboration, Akazoo will enable Viber’s worldwide network of more than one billion users to access, listen, and share music, playlists, stations, and lyrics from Akazoo’s extensive library of more than 40 million songs. In addition, Viber users will be able to join live listening rooms and listen to curated stations with their friends. Users can access these features directly from the Viber messaging app as part of its core chat functionality.

The integration will be available to Viber users in 17 countries and Akazoo’s platform is available in 25 countries and has over 43 million total registered users.

The Takeaway

By inspiring a return to a social music listening experience, pioneers like Akazoo and Viber set the stage for other social media platforms to join the movement by incorporating music sharing into their messaging functionality. As Akazoo founder Apostolos N. Zervos explained in a press release, “With audiences spending more time on messaging apps and consuming music on their devices, enriching messaging and social media with music is a natural fit. Granting audiences the ability to enjoy the same music, at the same time, advances and enriches both their musical and social experiences.”