
R&D X Concorder
Democratising public playlists
Empowering users to shape their listening experience in shared spaces
Shared music in public spaces often fails to please everyone. Traditional selections can’t cater to individual tastes, leaving some patrons feel a sense of disconnect or frustration.
Concorder transforms this by allowing users to curate their own song pools. Balancing individual preferences with the venue’s desired ambience through selective filtering ensures everyone hears music they enjoy, creating a more engaging environment.


A modern day jukebox
Concorder aims to democratise the play queues of offices, restaurants, bars and other spaces that publicly stream music. It manages the play queues of such spaces allowing everyone present to listen to a fair share of music that they like.
The Host App
The host (i.e., office, restaurant, etc) runs the Concorder Host App on a device. This app will control the music that is playing.

The Guest App
The guests (i.e., office employees, restaurant customers, etc) will run the Concorder Guest App on their mobile phones.

The Pool
On this app, they’ll be able to curate their song pool – the list of songs they would like the Host App to play.

The Host App will listen to any Guest Apps connecting to it and when that happens, it will talk to these apps in order to select the correct number of songs from each specific user’s pool and add them to the play queue.
Imagine this:
A Concorder user goes to a restaurant.
They’ve used Concorder before, so they pull out their phone and open the Concorder app.
At some point in the next few minutes, the user will start hearing a song that they like playing on the speakers. They will continue to hear more songs that they like throughout their stay (interspersed with other users’ songs).
At the end of their meal, they leave the restaurant. Their songs will then be removed from the queue and replaced with songs from the remaining present users.
If that person decides to go to a bar that also has Concorder running and playing music, they’ll be able to open the app and, start hearing their songs playing on the bar’s speakers, alongside everyone else’s songs.
The host will be able control the ambience of the venue through a set of filters that can exclude certain songs from being added to the queue.
What's next for Concorder
Concorder has been running in the Else studio — a shared space and so shared music library — as a beta product. Concorder’s development is on pause for the moment, but we have further ideas for developing it in the future and releasing it to companies to use. We’d love to get more studios and shared spaces to register their interest in using it, so if you’re interested, please drop us a line and we’ll happily talk you through what it takes to set-up.
BIMA Popular Culture 2023 — Silver
Our work on Concorder was recognised with a BIMA Silver award.

Interested in hearing more about Else R&D?