Inside New App Airbuds’ ‘Fundamentally Human’ Approach to Social Streaming

For nearly 25 years, tech startups have tried to crack the code on a simple idea: Building a social network based on music. The timing wasn’t right for Napster, Imeem, MySpace Music, Lala, Apple’s Ping or Facebook’s Spotify integration, among others. “It’s like a math problem that goes unsolved for hundreds of years and one day a mathematician comes along and solves it,” says Matt Graves, a Marin County, Calif., communications consultant who was once an exec for music-streaming pioneer Rhapsody. “I’d like to think that brilliant young Turk exists.”

Gilles Poupardin, a San Francisco entrepreneur, believes he is that Turk (although he is French) — and believes that Airbuds, his app with 5 million monthly users and $10 million in venture capital, is that service. Airbuds allows friends to view what each other is listening to on Spotify, Apple Music and other music-streaming services in real time, and discuss the tracks or add emojis, “SLAY” stickers and cat gifs to now-playing pages. It’s all very Facebook-in-2009 or Snapchat-in-2015, only with music as the central focus and common user language.

The timing is right, according to the Airbuds co-founder, some 15 years into the social-media and music-streaming eras. “Spotify is the access to the music. Airbuds is the social layer on top of it,” he says. “Gen Z, Gen Alpha, wants more than access. They want identity.”

The earlier music-plus-social services didn’t make it for several reasons. Some ran into technology-wary labels that, after winning battles against Napster and others over copyright infringement, were disinclined to license their content to startups. Others, like MySpace Music, lost out to more advanced tech models, like Facebook and Instagram, and wound up folding or selling out to bigger companies. Poupardin insists this won’t happen with his app. Airbuds connects to Spotify, Apple Music and others, so the company can piggyback on the music-streaming services’ content licenses and not have to worry about securing rights from labels and publishers.

Reps for all three major labels did not respond to requests for comment, but Seb Simone, Warner Music Group’s senior vp of global direct-to-fan services, is quoted in an Airbuds press release. “Airbuds isn’t just another app,” Simone said in part. “It’s a cult community of super-engaged fans expressing their love of music in a social, playful and creative way.”

How does Airbuds make money? So far, mostly through venture capital investment — predominantly from Seven Seven Six, an investment firm run by Alexis Ohanian, a Reddit founder. In the future, Poupardin says, the app is working on a “one-stop shop for artist-superfan connection,” creating profiles for stars that will eventually enable merch and ticket sales. He adds that Airbuds is testing a subscription model that “unlocks customization features.” Also, he says, Airbuds “briefly experimented” with advertising before abandoning the plan. 

After attending college in Paris, Poupardin helped create tech ventures, including DrinkEntrepeneurs and Whyd, a voice-controlled speaker that preceded Amazon’s Alexa. After building Capuccino, a social app for sharing audio clips with real-life friends, he and co-founder Gawen Arab hit on the Airbuds idea, launching in October 2022. “It took up slowly at first,” Poupardin says. “We started adding more features and it started growing way faster.” 

Airbuds allows users to react to shared songs with stickers, badges and emojis — some of which are customized with artists’ images, including Pink Pantheress, Tame Impala and others. It also provides charts, Spotify Wrapped-style weekly recaps and, significantly, chat features. According to Poupardin, artists have picked up on fans sharing customized content on Airbuds and asked their managers and label reps to figure out how to work with the service. 

“You could have built Airbuds a few years earlier, but it didn’t have the critical mass of folks on streaming. It didn’t have the AI-slop-infested Internet. So the culture wasn’t quite ready for it,” Ohanian says. “This is a way to share what you’re listening to with your actual friends. It’s fundamentally human.”