Skip to main content

Listen to music together, simultaneously, with new app Vertigo

How to get started on Vertigo
The next time you want to have a silent dance party — one that lets you and all your friends listen to the same music at the same time for better choreographed routines — you may want to check out Vertigo. The new app understands the transcendent power of music, and what better way to connect with your friends across the world (or across the room) than by sharing a tune? Vertigo lets you share your music with one person, a group of people, or the public in real-time so that they’re listening to exactly what you’re listening to. Not just the same song, but the exact same second of the same song.

With $10 million in funding under its belt, Vertigo clearly has proven its potential to investors. And much of that potential, founder Greg Leekley says, lies in millennials and Generation Z.

“The young demographic doesn’t separate what happens in their virtual lives from what happens in the real world,” Leekley said in an interview with TechCrunch. “And when we asked them, they were more interested in hearing songs that their friends were listening to than celebrities.”

It seems that Leekley is looking to tap into our sense of FOMO by ensuring that we’re never really missing out, and can always share what our friends are experiencing aurally. After all, Leekley noted, that’s what makes Snapchat so successful — it’s empowered young users to live life with one another as it happens.

There are, in fact, Snapchat-esque features available in Vertigo. Not only can you listen to music with your friends, you can also superimpose text, video, and pictures onto your audio files, allowing users to curate and personalize their experiences a bit more.

So how does it work? Right now, Vertigo connects with Spotify Premium accounts (so yeah, you’ll have to have one of those in order to use the app) in order to avoid legal SNAFUs, and allows users to share songs that all parties already have access to. In the future, however, Vertigo hopes that it might partner with other music platforms as well.

Editors' Recommendations

Lulu Chang
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Fascinated by the effects of technology on human interaction, Lulu believes that if her parents can use your new app…
I found a huge problem with the new ChatGPT iPhone app
ChatGPT app running on an iPhone.

Seemingly out of nowhere, OpenAI released its official ChatGPT iOS app this week. Available for both iPhones and iPads, the free app allows you to use the popular AI chatbot in a much simpler, easier way than ever before. No more messing with the mobile website or trying to fiddle with uncertain third-party apps — just download the official ChatGPT application, and you're good to go.

It's a big step forward to make ChatGPT more accessible and to get it into the hands of more people. Naturally, I was curious to test it out for myself. I've been using the ChatGPT iPhone app to ask the chatbot various questions, and while the whole thing works just like you'd expect, there's one big, glaring problem that makes me never want to touch the app again.
The ChatGPT iPhone app's biggest limitation
ChatGPT (left) vs. Perplexity AI (right) Digital Trends

Read more
TikTok just launched a new way for you to make money on the app
Person's hand holding a smartphone with TikTok's logo on screen, all in front of a blurred background.

There are already a handful of ways for content creators to make money using TikTok, but now the app is adding a brand new way for creators to monetize their content with the newly introduced TikTok Series.

Announced today in a TikTok blog post, Series are the same types of videos you'd normally find on the app, but they are hidden behind a paywall that individual creators can set. This means that delivering premium content on TikTok is easier than ever before for both creators and their audiences.

Read more
Don’t listen to billionaires like Elon Musk — app stores are fantastic
App store icon showing three notifications.

It’s time to celebrate the app store. Not just Apple’s App Store, but Google Play too. They are digital toy shops, full of wonders and joy, available to everyone who walks through the virtual door. When you’re inside you feel safe and secure, everything is in place for you to quickly pay for all your new things, so you walk away happy and satisfied.

App stores are the lifeblood of our smartphones, and trust me — you don’t want to know what it would be like without them. But let's imagine it for a moment because there has been a lot of noise over the past few days about app stores being bad places. Don’t listen, because this is only true if you’re a billionaire wanting to become, er, more of a billionaire.
Confidence and convenience

Read more