Hi Friends,

Yesterday, Sept 1st, Spotify published a breaking change to their support for music streaming apps like Earbuds. As a result, users who connect Earbuds to Spotify - roughly half of our users - will no longer be able to play music in our app. This change impacts hundreds of applications around the world and signals a shift in Spotify’s strategy.

We've been preparing for this day for some time. Our research has uncovered a few ways to work with Spotify’s new constraints, but it will require several changes to the app. So many, in fact, that we’ve made the difficult decision to sunset Earbuds Live, effective Tuesday, September 6, 2022.

If you have playlists that only exist in Earbuds, now is the time to save them to your music streaming platform. You can do so from Profile > Shared > playlist > More menu in the upper right corner.

This was a hard decision for me and our team. We started Earbuds with the mission of deepening connections through the sharing of music. Since then we’ve watched in awe as several NFL players and other pro athletes used Earbuds to connect with their fans in real time.  We are proud of the moments we brought to life and the experiences we created for our users. We gave this vision everything we had, and closing this chapter is especially tough but we know this is the right decision.

However, sometimes when one door closes, another opens.

As some of you know, we’ve been working on a new Earbuds. One that will renew and re-envision our mission to deepen connections through sharing music. Part of our decision not to fix Earbuds Live is that we are headed toward an even brighter future, anyway, and we simply won’t be distracted.

I couldn't be more excited to share our new direction with you. We took all our learnings from Earbuds Live and we’re leveraging our existing technology to solve a bigger problem. It should be easy to share music and why it matters, and Earbuds Chat will be the best way to share and connect over music. Period.

We hope you’ll sign up for our private beta of Earbuds Chat, arriving mid-November. We'll be spreading the word on social media but we know nothing beats a recommendation from a friend, so we hope you'll pass the sign-up link to your networks, too. You’ll also be able to use Spotify with Earbuds Chat. 😉Until then, we’ll be heads-down working for you. Music is truly better together, and we’re eternally grateful to the Earbuds community for their support and enthusiasm. We’ll be back. And soon.

My very best,

Jason Fox, Founder