Former Tufts University undergrads have created an app that has burst onto the scene like lightning. Cymbal is a music-sharing platform and is similar to Instagram with its simple interface and stunning graphics. 

Cymbal’s Head of Growth and only non-Tufts grad, Charlie Kaplan, recently contacted me about featuring WXOU, Oakland University’s student-run radio station, on the app. Fast forward a month and WXOU is a verified account and gaining followers as fast as wildfire.

Cymbal is set to launch a college radio vertical — a featured section on the app, dedicated to college radio stations — and Kaplan took time to answer a few questions to get students excited about the up-and-coming social networking app.

What exactly is Cymbal and why do we need it?

Kaplan: Cymbal is a music discovery app for the iPhone. It’s commonly compared to Instagram, but rather than posting photos or videos, you post songs from Soundcloud and Spotify. Then you follow your friends, as well as favorite blogs, artists, venues, etc., and your feed becomes a fully-playable, constantly-updated playlist, curated by the people who matter.

People love Cymbal for different reasons, so I’ll just speak for myself. I need Cymbal because, despite all it’s convenience, the advent of digital music made it too easy for me to enjoy music in isolation. Cymbal helps me get recommendations from the sources I’m interested in, like NPR Hip Hop, or RAC, Chloe Moretz, instead of from faceless algorithms. And not only does that make it easier to find great music, I think it makes the music I find more significant. Here’s what I mean: Hearing a punk song is one thing; Hearing it from my friend who knows more about punk than anyone else is another. It’s the older sibling thing: So much of your feeling about a song is formed by whom it came from. Cymbal is bringing that back to music.

What is it like working for a start-up app?

Kaplan: It’s fun! And crazy. It’s definitely not for everyone. 

The upside is it’s whatever you make of it. If you feel boxed in at a job where your role is very defined, a startup is a cool place to be. If you can work on something you really believe in (which Cymbal definitely is for me), then you feel like you’re solving an important problem and making your world cooler.

The downside is that you can’t turn off. It’s sort of how I imagine it’s like to have a child: If we don’t make this thing survive and thrive, it won’t. So it’s not like you can ever take your work lightly. Having email and Slack on your phone do not make this easier, by the way.

Describe the feeling of receiving $1.1 million in seed financing at such a young age.

Kaplan: I mean… insane. But everything needs to be taken in perspective. $1.1 million by itself is an absurd amount of money; $1.1 million for a team trying to make the web’s best way to share and discover music is not. For us it was more like, “This is real. We’ve been convincing ourselves this is a great solution to a real problem, and then we convinced someone else. Now we actually get to do it.” That money is a big part of making those dreams come true, without sounding too corny, and it’s not too often in life that someone hears your crackpot idea and says, “Yes. Do it.” Especially since the groups and individuals that funded us are pretty amazing, and have been really helpful at the moments when that challenge has been strenuous.

Explain the college vertical Cymbal is launching and why the app is focused on college radio stations.

Kaplan: Most of the Cymbal team had radio shows in college, and we loved them. But college radio stations face a common problem: It’s hard to get people to listen. This is odd, because college radio has long been the place where alternative and emerging music has found it’s first home. CMJ, for example, was founded on that idea. That’s also why Rolling Stone charts the top songs in college radio on the back page of every issue.

So this is weird, right? People both seem to care a lot about what college radio is doing, and yet don’t listen. Considering that 4/5ths of Cymbal were college students as of May, this seemed like a pretty immediate problem. It also seemed like a very obvious way find the right users for Cymbal. Here’s what I mean: We want to be the world’s best community for music lovers, and college radio stations have already done the hard work of finding them. So by featuring college stations we’re not just exposing where all that cool music is coming from, we’re also making DJs and stations be some of the most important voices in a community that cares what they have to play.

What does Cymbal’s future look like?

Kaplan: The goal is to make Cymbal the universal listening room. No matter what you like to listen to, or for that matter how you listen, you should be able to get on Cymbal and find your community. We’ve got work ahead of us: We’re working on a web and an Android app, for example, and will be launching more streaming app integrations to join Soundcloud and Spotify as time goes on. Then we get to have fun, figuring out new ways to get people the music that matters, to bring artists and listeners closer, to help musicians get the word out about what they’re doing. But that all starts with amazing people sharing their favorite music on the app, and that’s already happening fast.