The Secret to New Music Friday: Meet HotDrop, the Underground App Powering Millions of Song Discovery
New app for music discovery and sharing, HotDrop, is gathering support among Gen Z users with over 3 million songs discovered in its first year.
Streaming platforms such as Spotify and Apple Music claim to create playlists that help encourage music discovery. However, every week these playlists are filled with tracks from well established artists. Inevitably creating a wall for indie artists to be discovered. New music app HotDrop, is making music discovery an even playing field for indie artists while also providing a fun experience for users.
HotDrop gives users the opportunity to discover new music by listening to 30-second song highlights. Listeners can easily swipe through undiscovered music similar to how they would scroll through their favorite social media feeds. HotDrop’s formula towards music discovery has garnered attention amongst thousands of gen Z music lovers and university students nationwide.
Now HotDrop is taking music discovery to the next level by launching HotDrop Studio for indie artists.
HotDrop Studio for indie artists encourages early-stage music distribution and provides analytic capabilities by putting artists’ music right in front of superfans. When artists upload their music to HotDrop they retain complete ownership of their content and can work on songs and replace or delete them at any time.
With each 30-second snippet of a song, a listener can choose to like, dislike, favorite, or share a particular song. Fans can find and enjoy full versions of the songs they discover, found under the “Liked Songs” section of a listener’s profile. Some of these songs may not yet be available on other platforms. They can swipe right to read an artist’s bio and connect on socials.
With Hodtrop, Indie artists have much more flexibility and creativity around classifying their music with HotDrop. Artists also classify their own music. Choosing up to 3 genres and unlimited subgenres from a provided list.
HotDrop was founded in a dorm room at Indiana University, home to the best music school in the U.S., the Jacobs School of Music by Max Goldberg and Steven Segel.
From the start, we were creating an app for ourselves, because we thought listening to shorter snippets of songs was a cool concept and would allow us to reliably listen to more music, faster, in a sitting. Quickly, it became a really engaging way for our friends and other students to discover music. It became the go-to app for people who really love discovering new music, because everyone’s sick and tired of listening to the same mainstream music heard all the time on Spotify and Apple Music.
HotDrop Founder and CEO Max Goldberg
Max and I first met around the time when Snapchat and Instagram were popping up. We watched our friends become addicted to their cell phones, constantly consuming content and connecting through all these different social media apps. There was something about the content discovery that intrigued us, watching a video or picture find its way through our friend group. With HotDrop, we now watch music shared and discovered the same way.
HotDrop Founder and COO Steven Segel.
HotDrop plans to deliver a full suite of tools, designed specifically by artists for artists to further the indie artist’s journey. Once reserved only for label-backed artists, indie artists can access all the tools they need, at a price well under what they’d pay for other platforms. At launch, they are offering a deal for artists interested in uploading their music for discovery by new superfans, and opening public beta for listeners by invite only. Indie artists who upload three songs to HotDrop before the end of December receive 6 months of HotDrop Studio for free. Interested artists can sign up for early access to HotDrop Studio here, and listeners can sign up for the HotDrop Mobile release in beta here.