Send Songs To Your Friends With Msty, A New Music Messaging App

A new app aims to combine the best parts of Spotify and Snapchat: Msty will allow users to send instant messages with images and short lines of text accompanied by songs. The London-based startup boasts it is the first messaging service to partner with Apple Music, Universal, Sony, and Warner.

Grant Bovey, Msty’s founder and a celebrity businessman best known in the U.S. for boxing Ricky Gervais, says the app’s image templates are designed as a “sort of cross between a greeting card and a Snapchat.” Users will have access to a catalog of 2,000 songs at launch, which is expected to eventually grow to 22 million.

The company hopes that musical-greeting IMs will appeal to a wider audience than other messaging apps. “Someone who is 67 may not use Snapchat, but they will use this,” Bovey says.

Msty, which stands for “My Song To You,” is one of a number of apps that offer similar functionality to users—like messaging service Tango, for example. While building such apps is quite simple, development has been hampered by the complicated issue of rights clearance regarding song libraries; Msty has managed to build one of the largest catalogs to date.

Msty is currently available for free on iOS and Android. The company, which declined to discuss monetization of its product, plans to launch in the European Union and Brazil in the coming months.