Rednote enters the music messaging space

Undeterred by the uphill battle and recent closures in the space, there’s another new player in the crossovers of music, social media, and mobile. The company is called Rednote. It’s a messaging app where users can share music clips, currently slated for launch this fall. Rednote has a page on startup seed funding service AngelList with the tagline, “Let the music do the talking.” Most companies in this category rely on free 30-second previews for this function, with full songs requiring payment, but there’s no information yet about what Rednote’s promised library of more than 8 million audio clips will look or sound like.

We’ve seen several efforts to enter this sweet spot, but many of them end up fizzling out. Maybe the funding never quite falls into place, the legal challenges of licensing any tracks used, or people just don’t latch on; in any case, very few efforts have succeeded. Perhaps the most notable one so far is Line, a messaging app that acquired MixRadio from Nokia after it was already established as a popular communication service. It seems that launching out of the gate as a social/music crossover is a tougher race. Cür Media is seeing some warning signs. Music Messenger didn’t last long. We’ll have to wait and see what we hear out of Rednote come autumn.