Why we built Vibes.
The shortest answer is that I missed sending songs to people. The longer answer is about what social media did to music and why a smaller, slower channel is worth building.
For about a decade, sharing a song with a friend meant sending a Spotify link in iMessage. That worked, but it never felt great. The link unfurls into a small grey card. The friend listens once, never replies, the conversation moves on. The song becomes another piece of stuff in a chat thread that nobody scrolls back through. There's no equivalent of "hey I sent you a postcard" — the moment is flat.
Meanwhile, every social network I used was getting worse for music. Spotify Wrapped became the once-a-year ritual where you find out what you played alone, in private, with no friends in the loop. Last.fm scrobbles to a public feed nobody reads. Apple Music's "shared with you" is a drawer you forget about. None of them solved the actual thing: sending one song to one specific person, with a small note, and having that arrive as a moment, not a link.
I want this app to be small, deliberate, and a little bit precious. Like a postcard, not a tweet.
What was missing.
Here's the thing about a postcard. It is small. It is specific. It is addressed. It comes from one person and it arrives at one person, and along the way it accumulates the texture of having been touched — handwriting, a stamp, the edge of a coffee ring. You don't read a postcard the way you read an email or a tweet. You read it as a thing somebody made for you.
Music sharing on the internet has, for whatever reason, drifted in the opposite direction. Every product I've used has tried to make music sharing more efficient, more searchable, more public. Every product. That efficiency is great when you're Spotify trying to grow a recommendation engine. It's terrible when you're a person trying to send a song to a friend.
The rules I started with.
So I started building. The rules were: no public profiles, no follower counts, no algorithm. The only feed is the one your friends made for you. Every Sunday you get a short recap — your top color palette, the friend you sent the most songs to, the lyric that hit the hardest. That's it. No leaderboard. No "year in review" performance.
I knew, even on day one, that those rules were going to cost me users I'd never have. There's a category of person who is going to install Vibes, see the empty inbox, and bounce because there's nothing to scroll. That's fine. The product is built for the people who don't bounce — the people who'd rather have a real song from a real friend than the warm bath of an infinite stream.
The premise is that most music doesn't need to be a public broadcast. The song you'd send your sister isn't the same song you'd send your gym friend, and neither of those are content. They're just songs. A small, intimate channel between you and the people who actually know you is what I want to use.
What it actually turned into.
I shipped a first version to a group chat in December 2024. It was mostly an iMessage extension with a bad UI. The group chat was eight people. Within two weeks, all eight were sending songs daily. The thing that surprised me was that I was the bottleneck — the friends had taste, they had songs to send, they just didn't have a vocabulary for sending them one-to-one without it feeling like a Spotify link in a thread.
The product, from there, was mostly an exercise in getting out of the way. Make it easy to pick a song. Make it easy to send. Make the inbox calm. Make the act feel like an act. Don't add anything that turns the friendship into a metric. That last rule is the one I've broken most often, and the one I've reverted most often.
Eighteen months later, the rules are still the rules. The product is small. The inbox is calm. The recap is gentle. The TestFlight is open. I think it's good.
Why now.
The other reason I built this now is that the rest of the social internet feels increasingly off, and I wanted somewhere to send songs that wasn't off. I don't want to argue about TikTok or Instagram or whether algorithmic feeds are bad in some abstract sense. I just know that I open my phone and feel slightly worse afterwards, and I open Vibes and feel slightly better, and the difference is that one is small-on-purpose and the other isn't.
If you have a small group of friends you'd like to send music to — friends, not followers, not the algorithm, not strangers — and you want a calm, beautiful, careful place to do that, this is what I built. Drop your email if you want to be there when it ships. Or, better — install the TestFlight today and send your first song to one specific person.
— Scott · Brooklyn, April 2026