Streaming App Stationhead Integrates Apple Music
Social radio streaming app Stationhead has integrated Apple Music, making it platform-agnostic and opening it up to Apple's 30 million subscribers.
Earlier this year, former Stage singer Ryan Star and web designer/coder Jace Kay launched Stationhead, an app built on top of Spotify’s open API that allows users with premium accounts to turn their playlists into personalized radio stations and interact with listeners on their stations as the dedicated DJ.
The app quickly gained traction within the music industry — among the admirers, investors and advisors are Good Charlotte‘s Joel Madden, former UMG head of digital Rob Wells, PledgeMusic founder Benji Rogers and E Street Band guitarist Stevie Van Zandt — not only for its user experience, but for its function that allows each playlist to be simultaneously streamed within each listener’s streaming service, meaning that each listener counts as a separate stream — a potentially significant boon for the music industry at scale.
Now, Stationhead has integrated Apple Music into its app, making it platform-agnostic and opening up its service to Apple Music’s 30 million subscribers. Significantly, according to TechCrunch, it also allows for both services to work almost in tandem; if a user has Apple Music but the DJ is playing from Spotify, for example, Stationhead will still play the song simultaneously for each listener, regardless of which service they are using. (If a song is not available on one of the platforms — a rare occurrence for the two leading streamers — a substitute song will play until the next song on the playlist begins.)
In June, Billboard spoke to Star and Kay about their plans for the app, and its potential not just for users, but for artists and record labels. “You’re sending a command for everybody to play [a song] in sync, and you’re also giving them control to be able to hop on and talk at any time and say whatever they want,” Kay explained. “If you’re a popular artist and you have a million listeners and you play 15 songs, that’s 15 million streams. And after you’re done, the people don’t disappear; with this, if you’re off air, people stick around.”
“It’s turning your voice on, it’s turning the world on, it’s taking something that’s off, that’s broken, and turning it on,” Star said. “So we look at FM and AM and we say, ‘ON.'”