Once a week, somebody writes another think-piece about how social media is broken. They are correct. They are also a decade late. The thing they describe — the algorithmic feed that flattens your friends into engagement bait — has already been the default everywhere for years. Music apps included.
I started Vibes because I wanted somewhere to send songs to people I like. Not followers, not subscribers, not the algorithm. People. The friends whose taste actually matters to me. The roommate who'd love this Phoebe Bridgers song. The college friend who needs to hear what's on this Mount Kimbie record. That kind of audience.
I looked at what existed. Spotify Blend turns your friendship into a playlist owned by the algorithm. Instagram lets you "share music to your story" — which means you publish to four hundred strangers and call it sharing. iMessage works, but the song you send dies in a thread three days later under a Venmo request and a screenshot. None of it felt like a postcard. None of it felt like the act of handing someone a song.
So I wrote down three rules. They are short and they are stubborn. They are the whole product.
01
No algorithm.
An algorithm is a stranger you can never quite see. It decides who hears you and how loudly. It rewards posting often and posting big and posting in ways that test well in someone's A/B framework. None of that is friendship. None of that is taste.
Vibes has no recommended-for-you, no "people you may know," no for-you tab. There is one and only one source of content: the friends whose phone numbers are in your contacts who also use Vibes. If you have eleven friends on the app, you'll see eleven friends. If you have two, you'll see two. The size of your social graph is not a metric I want to grow on your behalf.
An algorithm is a stranger you can never quite see.
02
No feed.
A feed implies a stream — something that flows past you forever, demanding maintenance, training you to scroll. I didn't want that for music. Music is a moment. Music deserves a frame.
When a friend sends you a song on Vibes, you get one card. One. It sits there until you open it. There is no "next song" autoplay, no "you might also like," no infinite up-arrow. When you've heard it, the card files itself away and the surface is empty again. The interface looks more like an inbox than a timeline — because that's actually what it is.
I chose this on purpose, even though it kills almost every retention metric an investor would ask about. Empty is not a bug. Empty is the point. Empty means I got out of your way.
Empty is not a bug. Empty is the point.
03
No tracking.
Your phone number is hashed on your device before it ever reaches my servers. I never see the raw number. I never sell it. I never share it. The only thing the server stores is a one-way fingerprint that lets two people who already know each other discover that they're both on Vibes — and nothing else.
I don't run any third-party analytics SDKs. I don't run any ad SDKs because I don't run ads. I don't have a "growth" team because growth is something that happens or doesn't happen — it isn't a department. The data I collect is the smallest amount I can get away with and still ship the product. If you want to read the receipts, my privacy policy is short and my security page is shorter.
The data I collect is the smallest amount I can get away with and still ship the product.
What this means in practice.
It means Vibes will never have a viral mechanic. There is no "share to your story," no public counter, no leaderboard. The most popular thing you can ever do on Vibes is send one song to one friend. I am very deliberately building a product that does not scale in the way Silicon Valley uses that word.
It means I will probably stay small. I'm fine with that. The world doesn't need another app that wants to be everyone's homepage. It needs more apps that want to be one specific thing, done well, for the handful of people who care.
It means the experience scales with how much your friends use it. If your group chat is on Vibes, this is the best music app you've ever used. If only you are, it's a beautifully made empty room. I'd rather have the empty room than fake the friends.
And it means I'll keep saying no to features that look reasonable on paper. There's a list of things I refuse to build. It's not exhaustive but it's representative. Every one of those refusals costs me users I'll never have. I made my peace with that before I started.
If you're still reading.
If you got this far, you probably already get it. You don't need me to convince you that the feed is bad — you've felt it. You don't need a graph showing screen-time decline curves. You just want a small, calm place to share music with the four or five people whose opinions you trust.
That's what Vibes is. That's all Vibes is. I hope you'll send your first song.
Get the app
Read about me
— Scott
San Francisco, 2026 🌉