Why stand outside your girlfriend’s window playing Peter Gabriel on a boom box when you can simply text her a self-portrait with “In Your Eyes” attached instead? The app makers behind MavenSay are banking on Generation Y’s love of all things text-related with their new music messaging app, Rithm. Launched July 24 and already dubbed “the Snapchat of music,” Rithm lets users send friends and potential love interests any of the 20 million songs in the iTunes, Spotify and Rdio libraries, accompanied by a brief text message, animation, photo or video. The free app is 15.7 megabytes and requires iOS 6.0, or higher-running operating systems on an iPhone 3GS, 4, 4S, 5, iPad or iPod Touch 3 and higher. Downloading the app and signing up using Facebook or Twitter is simple, though linking a Spotify account required some user name/password retrieval. Rithm makes it easy to text a thank-you note containing Daft Punk’s “Get Lucky” to a special lady friend, or Kanye West’s “New Slaves” to some buddies with a “smoke” emoji animation coupled with the “Yeezus” banger. Users can also add location data to their messages and share the outgoing text on Facebook and Twitter. Friends who have yet to download the brand-new app will get a text message with your note and a hyperlink; touching the link opens a Web browser that plays the 30-second sample of “New Slaves,” while the “smoke” emoji puffs away. Sending Rithm messages from app to app, with Spotify or Rdio accounts linked on each end, enables playback of entire tracks. MavenSay uses application programming interfaces from Spotify CORE, Rdio, SoundCloud and Gracenote — which allows Rithm to identify songs by their fingerprint, a la Shazam.
