Social features have been increasingly important to streaming music services like Spotify and Deezer in recent years, as they help people share recommendations and listening activity with their wider social networks.
What's been lacking is a strong interconnection between the social aspects of these rival services, beyond currently-playing tracks showing up in Facebook's news ticker. A new website called Hatchet aims to improve on that.
Announced last week via a blog post, Hatchet is currently available in closed beta for "friends and loved ones", developed by the team behind existing digital music service Tomahawk, and building on its ideas of providing better connections between the various streaming music services.
"Hatchet is designed to be an interoperable music & fan community - full of your friends (regardless of what music services they use), your musical influencers (regardless of whether they are your friends), and set of rich and expansive data around your favourite music and artists," explained the blog post.
"A place that adds value to Tomahawk users, and creates value for those that don’t use Tomahawk. A place where users can share music, tastes and thoughts. A place where users can easily have their taste data and playlists resolved against one or more music services - and be portable across them. A place where a subscriber of one music service can benefit from the tastes of their musical influencers even though they may use a different set of music services."
Hatchet's developers describe the project as an MVP – minimum viable product in technology industry parlance – although they stress that it has "a little more emphasis on the 'viable' over the 'minimum'."
Hatchet is designed to complement rather than replace Tomahawk, which is a downloadable digital music player capable of playing songs from a variety of services, while linking up friends to browse one another's libraries.
It also spawned the Toma.hk website, which enables people to search for artists, albums and tracks across Spotify, Rdio and Deezer, including pasting in links from those services to play music in the others. Tomahawk has also just launched an Android version of its app as a private beta test.
The announcement of Hatchet came shortly after Spotify acquired music technology firm The Echo Nest, which had also been trying to forge easier links between streaming music services – albeit through metadata for the global catalogue of digital music tracks, rather than community features. Since that announcement, Rdio and Rhapsody have cut their ties with The Echo Nest.
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