Tango is a cross between Skype and WhatsApp, offering messaging, voice-over-IP (VoIP) calls and video chat to its users. Music has clearly been on its agenda too: in October 2013 we reported on its partnership with Spotify, pulling in 30-second song clips for its users to share with one another via a dedicated Tango Music tab within its iOS and Android apps.
More recently, the company raised a monster $280m funding round in March, claiming at the time that it had 70m active users out of 200m registered users.
Tango’s next step into music is a standalone app: Tango Music Pix. It was released for iPhone and iPad in the US on Friday: the latest example of a social app trying to blend music and photos. That’s an app genre we’ve been decidedly sceptical about, but it’s interesting to see Tango judging the experience worthy of a spin-off app.
“Tell your story in 30 seconds with Tango Music Pix! Combine your favorite pictures and music into a beautiful, customised slideshow that you can easily share with your family and friends,” explains its App Store listing.
“Simply mix your selected photos with your favorite song , and a 30-second slideshow is ready to share with your friends on Tango, Facebook, Twitter, or email.” All the music clips come from Spotify’s library, rather than users’ own iTunes collections, as in other apps of this kind.
Tango Music Pix is part of Tango’s expanding family of apps, although the others are all games sitting on top of its social platform: Farm Coin Dozer, Go Car Racing, Roulette and so on.
But Tango isn’t alone in the social/mobile space in seeing music as a potential spin-off: Japanese social app Line has Line Music in its homeland, while Korean rival KakaoTalk also has its own KakaoMusic. Those are fuller-featured digital music services, though, rather than the photo-focused Tango Music Pix.
Now here’s a fun question to leave you with: if Facebook ever decided to follow suit with its own music spin-off, which of these strategies would it opt for?
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