Hi there! My name is Janko Roettgers, and this is Lowpass. This week: A new music app looks familiar, and streaming services are adding more sports content.

One man’s 15-year quest to break down streaming music silos 

Wouldn’t it be great if you could exchange music recommendations with your friends, no matter whether they use Spotify, Apple Music, or Bandcamp? What if you could follow DJs and other tastemakers online and automatically turn their social media feeds into playlists? Or what if you could fine-tune your music recommendations with AI to only get recommendations for songs you’ve never played before?

Those are a few of the tasks the new music app Parachord is trying to take on by freeing music metadata from individual subscription service silos. In essence, Parachord wants to one day make songs universally playable and shareable, no matter what services you subscribe to. For now, Parachord is still very much in its infancy, with a series of unstable, experimental builds slowly laying the path to a beta release.

But the idea behind it is something Parachord mastermind J Herskowitz has been noodling over for a long time. Not only is Herskowitz a music tech veteran who’s worked at Spotify, LimeWire, and AOL Music, he also built this very app before. 

Back in 2011, Herskowitz banded together with a small group of likeminded misfits to build a music app called Tomahawk that used a plug-in architecture to tap into the music libraries of services like Rdio, Grooveshark, and Beats Music. The app also offered access to a social layer for music fans and allowed bands to share their latest tracks with universal links. 

It was a fascinating idea, but without a clear business model, it was ultimately not sustainable. Tomahawk development effectively ended in 2015. “We all needed to get jobs,” Herskowitz remembers. “I was very sad when Tomahawk went away.”

Except, it never fully went away.