During the SXSW festival in Austin last week, French startup Whyd was showing off their SXSW playlist, but they also announced that their music social network has integrated with Deezer, meaning that users can compile playlists, mixing songs from Deezer, Soundcloud, YouTube & more. In addition to spending a few great evenings with Whyd’s cofounders, Gilles Poupardin & Jie Meng-Gérard, I took a break from all the bustling and sat down with the Poupardi, Whyd’s CEO, to talk about Why’d progress.
As you may recall, Whyd announced a seed fundraising round of $700,000 in January 2014 – at that time they stated that they wanted to be the world’s online record collection, a mixmatch of various mediums all playable from one location. Replacing tapes, vinyls & discs with various web music services, Whyd’s integration with Deezer is the first step in enabling users to truly share their music with friends.
Poupardin talked about his frustrations with how Deezer users can’t truly share music with Spoify users, and said that he would like Whyd to be a common middle -ground where Deezer users can mix their favorite tracks from Deezer with live video-taped sessions uploaded to YouTube, for example, allowing Spotify users to listen to the equivalent tracks on Spotify in place of Deezer tracks.
“If you like a deezer track and I am a Spotify user, shouldn’t we be able to share music?” – Gilles Poupardin, Co-founder & CEO, Whyd
During my comparison of Deezer & Spotify last year, I pointed out that there already exist applications to transfer tracks from Deezer to Spotify – there is a commong track ID system that both parties use which make the process easier – and Poupardin evoked the idea of using this common structure to push the appropriate track from the appropriate service to any user, truly platform agnostic.
Poupardin also talked of Why’d current relocation to San Francisco – though the announcement hasn’t been officially made, this is to be expected, as they look to follow in the Mindie footsteps and find traction in the Silicon Valley. Whyd currently boasts 50,000 registered users on their platform, with that figure growing 50% per month since the beginning of the year.