In an era where social media is ubiquitous, the arts have been effectively finding their niche. Pinterest has been cultivating teenagers’ aesthetics for over 15 years. Movie review website Letterboxd has a reporter at every red carpet talking to celebrities about their four favorite movies. Even AirBuds, a relatively new music social media app that shows what your friends are listening to, reached No. 2 on the Apple App Store’s music category just under a year ago.
Utkarsh “Uty” Uppal found his own space with Echo, a music app that lets you rank songs or albums and discuss them with friends. When recommending to friends of my generation (Gen Z), I’ve called it “a Letterboxd for music,” and that usually gets the point across. Echo is more gamified than many other ranking apps, which gives it a unique appeal as well. Before I dive into the features, you should get to know the man behind it all.
Uty has been ingrained in music for over a decade already. He’s been producing his own music since high school, and those skills have linked surprisingly well to computer science and programming. In Los Angeles, he worked as a software engineer and in several marketing jobs, pretty much all in the music industry. Eventually, after he was done studying in Los Angeles he decided to make a cross-country move to New York City. He began building Echo from the ground up shortly after.
“I used Letterboxd,” Uty said, “And I kind of realized, there’s some stuff in the music realm that’s similar, but nothing in my age group, my friend group and my social network that stands out.”
The process began with implementing a user-friendly mindset. At the onset, he saw how Letterboxd used a relatively objective approach to how you review your movies, but he realized that could never work in a medium as subjective as music.
“I was like, ‘Okay, let’s gamify this,’” Uty said. Let’s make this a little more fun to use. Let’s use this algorithm to build out a comparative ranking feature. Make it look good, so it can feel good, and package it up and show that, sell that, push that to users.”
In the digital age, you’re bound to be on your phone a lot, and Uty always take those moments as lessons in developing Echo. He’s always paying attention to how he interacts with different apps, in terms of where to press, haptics, animations, or whatever else you can think of.
As Echo has been growing, so has the team behind it. Uty has brought on a designer, a business lead, and some interns for growth and development. Despite the team number growing, Uty has confidence he’ll still be able to share his vision for Echo. In fact, he really enjoys the collaborative nature of the process now. It’s admirable how he wants everyone’s voice to be heard.
“It’s just as much their project as mine,” Uty said.
One of Echo’s core features, along with its rankings, is its discussion posts. You can feel free to talk about anything with two clicks, and you can even tag specific albums and songs in your posts to add context or ask questions. This, along with an Echo Discord server, has helped foster an, albeit small at the moment, yet very active and passionate community.
Echo has a streak feature that tracks how many days in a row you’ve logged a ranking, and Uty was telling me how two top streak-holders were mourning the loss of their top spot in the Echo Discord. One of them was even saying how he was going to ‘retire his streak.’
“It’s funny, it’s cool, it’s good to see people liking it,” Uty said. “And it’s a peek into seeing how things are, hopefully going to go in the future. Unfortunately for the two guys that just lost their streak, I was gonna roll out a restore streak feature soon too.”
While Echo has plenty to offer in its current stage, that won’t stop Uty and his team from continuing to innovate and tweak certain features. The main priority is not to overwhelm the user and to really sell the core features: the rankings and discussion. He recognizes that people aren’t coming to Echo to revolutionize their listening experience, but to have a fun supplementary activity and to engage with like-minded people.
Some ideas for new improvements include revamping their recommendations engine to help discover new music and a live events section. He also wants some more basic additions, like direct messaging with friends and compatibility scores.
I’ve had an incredibly fun time on Echo over the two months I’ve had it, and if you’re a music lover, I highly recommend you give it a try. I’ve ranked over 60 albums at this point and love playing with the comparative features, in addition to having a living log of what I’ve been listening to. As the app grows, I can’t wait to see how it fleshes out. I hope to see you on it soon!
Add me @zachreagan8 !
