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UK-based Lost is a new app that lets users discover and experience music in a unique way.
Backed by 21 influential British tastemakers, including Fact, Complex UK, Dummy, Vice's Noisey, Thump, i-D brands, Stamp the Wax, and a host of other platforms, Lost is at once a music-discovery app, streaming service, publisher aggregator, concert tracker, and ticket vendor.
The app taps into curation in a novel way. Rather than relying on algorithms like Spotify or curators like Apple Music, Lost links up with the music sites mentioned above. Every day, the app sources the latest in new music and articles — interviews, reviews, and other posts — from these sites and then publishes them to its platform.
Songs are put into playlists that are updated daily, and each featured track provides a link back to the site from which it originates. In this way, Lost consolidates the latest in music and opinion from some of the industry's most influential voices into a single location.
In addition to publisher-driven curation, Lost has several other capabilities that may make it competitive against incumbents in the music-streaming space:
- Importing playlists from other streaming services. In addition to its native-playlist feature, which lets users create and edit their own mixes, Lost enables users to import their playlists from other music-streaming services, like Spotify, Apple Music, SoundCloud, and YouTube, so that they can be enjoyed in a single place.
- Bridging the digital and physical music experiences. For those seeking live-music experiences, Lost has partnered with Songkick, the concert-tracking and ticketing platform, to let users track and buy tickets to shows and festivals from within the app. Other streaming services — like Tidal and Pandora— also include features that let users buy tickets to upcoming concerts.
- Social component to connect with friends. The app includes a social component — a near necessity for apps nowadays — that allows users to connect to other friends using the app with Twitter, Facebook, or their phone contacts.
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