SocialSound Support

No — Apple Music is one of three supported services. SocialSound works with Apple Music Spotify YouTube Music for the Pulse side (news, releases, concerts, share extension).

That said, Apple Music has the deepest integration. If you want to host party games on your iPhone, Apple Music is currently required because the iPhone plays the music to the room and the broadcast uses Apple's MusicKit framework.

You can install the app and browse, but most flows go empty until you connect at least one service: artist news has nothing to feed, releases has nothing to track, games can't pick artists. Connect any one of the three to unlock the experience.

You don't need a paid subscription to the service — just an account linked through the service's sign-in. Some flows (Spotify in-app playback, for example) do require a paid tier on the service itself.

No. SocialSound Premium ($2.99/mo and up) is separate from your Apple Music subscription. Premium removes ads inside SocialSound, raises the followed-artist cap, and adds concert push alerts. It doesn't include or replace Apple Music itself — you keep paying Apple for that the same way you always have.

Three reasons: library access (MusicKit gives SocialSound direct read access to your library, so games can pick from artists you actually like), playback (Apple's ApplicationMusicPlayer framework can drive audio in-app and across paired devices, which is how iPhone-as-host works), and catalog (search + previews for hint sounds, album artwork, top tracks).

Spotify's iOS SDK can play music but can't broadcast to other devices the way MusicKit can; YouTube Music's API exposes search and OAuth but doesn't expose a full library to read from.

Yes. Anyone with Apple Music access (Individual, Family, Student, or via Apple One) can connect SocialSound. Each family member's connection reads their own library, not the family organizer's.

It's Spotify's API rule, not ours. Spotify's iOS SDK requires the listener to be on Spotify Premium for SDK-controlled playback. Free-tier accounts can sign in and see the UI, but tapping "Play Now" on a setlist or release falls back to a "Spotify Premium required" sheet instead of starting playback.

You can still browse setlists, get concert alerts, read artist news, and use the share extension on Spotify Free — only the in-app playback path is gated.

Not on iPhone-as-host today. The host-side audio fan-out uses Apple's MusicKit, which Spotify's SDK can't substitute for. You can join games hosted by someone else on any service — your phone just shows the game UI, the host's device plays the music.

The Music Video Guessing game is the exception — it uses YouTube videos for playback, which works regardless of which service you're connected to.

Spotify's OAuth tokens expire on a regular cycle (and sometimes after a Spotify password change or sign-out elsewhere). SocialSound refreshes silently most of the time, but if the refresh fails you'll see a "Reconnect Spotify" prompt the next time you open a Spotify-dependent screen. Tap it and you're back in 5 seconds.

YouTube Music's public API doesn't expose your full saved library, so we can't auto-import all the artists you follow there. Instead, SocialSound lets you manually add artists by name (or pull them from your YouTube subscriptions where available), and from there everything else — news, releases, shows, setlists — works the same as the other services.

The YouTube Data API has a quota of 10,000 units per day and each playlist-insert call costs ~50 units. Capping setlist conversions at 25 tracks keeps any single tester within the free quota and avoids "quota exceeded" errors mid-flow. Most setlists are under 25 songs anyway.

Not iPhone-as-host for the library-driven games (Music Bingo, Album Reveal, Mystery DJ, Mixtape Trivia). But the Music Video Guessing game works fully with YouTube Music as the host — that game uses YouTube video playback for everyone.

In SocialSound Play, open the Profile tab and tap your avatar. You have three options, and whatever you pick now shows on the host screen and to every other player in the room:

• Photo — pick any picture from your library and frame it.
• Image Playground (iOS 18.1 and later) — generate a custom avatar.
• Emoji — choose from the emoji grid.

Want to use a Memoji? iOS doesn't give apps a Memoji picker, so save your Memoji as an image first, then choose it under Photo: in Messages, send yourself the Memoji sticker, press and hold it, tap Save (or use a Memoji from the emoji keyboard in any note and save a screenshot), then pick it from your library in SocialSound.

The original EQfluency build shipped Pulse (artist news, releases, shows) and Play (party music games) as one app with a "pick a side" switch. We split them into two App Store listings — SocialSound Pulse and SocialSound Play — so each app is smaller, faster, and easier to discover for the use case that brought you here. They share the SocialSound brand and the SocialSound Premium subscription unlocks both at once. Your Apple Music library is unaffected (it's never stored on our servers).

OAuth requires a network connection on the first sign-in. If it 404s, the linked music service may need its iOS bundle ID updated on our side — email us so we can flag it.

Check that Settings → SocialSound → Notifications is on at the iOS level, AND that Settings → Concerts inside SocialSound has at least one subscribed artist. Concert pushes fire from a server-side scheduler — there's a 2–3 minute delay between an event posting and your push.

Subscriptions are managed by Apple. Open iOS Settings → Apple ID → Subscriptions → SocialSound → Cancel. Your Premium features stay active until the end of the current billing period.

SocialSound is rated 17+ because it plays music from your library, which can include explicit content from third-party music services. The app itself contains no user-generated content moderation, no in-app messaging, no adult content, and no purchases beyond the Premium tiers.