As a music lover, I’m always looking for ways to find new music, share music I love and engage with the music community. If you share that same sentiment, there is a new app available on the App Store that is perfect for you.

Echo is a fresh new app that launched in March 2025. You could quite literally call it the all-in-one music app: you can share music you love, discover new music, discover and share concerts, participate in daily challenges like rating your song of the day and even partake in the echo gauntlet– a game where you select the name of the artist and song playing as fast as you can.

Garner Hasler, a recent Northwestern University graduate, is the co-founder of Echo, alongside his longtime friend Cole Friedman and Friedman’s brother, Myles.

“I feel like in order to do a startup or create something on your own, you have to have the idea or a problem, but then you also kind of have to be not super happy with your current situation and your life or whatever,” Hasler joked. “So, me and Cole– we’ve been best friends through high school and through college. And we were both not happy with our jobs that we got out of college.I was doing banking and he was doing a consulting sales role. And yeah, we just both were not super happy with the nine to 5 life.”

Hasler continued to explain the development of Echo, and it turns out the initial idea was actually not a music sharing and discovery platform.

“The initial problem that we were trying to solve was actually the music algorithms on streaming services,” Hasler explained. “We felt like the recommendation algorithms…were pretty lackluster.”

As the team explored the idea further, they realized how difficult it is to accurately predict someone’s music taste, even with extensive personal information. If major companies with access to massive datasets still struggle to create effective recommendation systems, Hasler reasoned, it wouldn’t make sense to assume a small startup could do it better.

With solving algorithmic issues seeming to be impossible, the idea of what to do with Echo shifted.

“So then another problem we were talking about addressing was cross-platform sharing,” Hasler continued. “Especially Spotify to Apple Music. There’s not really a place where you can cross-platform share really well. So then that became the new problem we were focused on, and really just kind of started snowballing.”

Hasler said the team shifted gears, looking for more creative ways to design a music-sharing platform that not only learns users’ tastes but also mirrors the feel of social media. While that wasn’t the original plan, the concept evolved to combine music discovery, sharing, events and popular daily games all in one place.

“And that’s what we ended up building,” Hasler stated. “We were building it while we were working, and once we neared having a completed product, we got ready to launch and just quit our jobs, because we hated the jobs and we wanted to really put all our effort into this.”

When asked about potential future goals, Hasler shared that Echo is already a polished product from a development standpoint. The main priority at the moment is marketing and trying to attract new users.

“We definitely envision it being a big thing for 18-to-30-year-olds, because that is where music listening and music discovery and the want for daily games are the highest, I would say. As well as event attendance. But honestly, we believe that the app can really work for people of all ages, really for anyone interested in any type of music at all,” Hasler added. 

Ultimately, the goal with Echo is to bring as many music lovers together as possible. The team at Echo believes they have the best platform in the game when it comes to music-related social media.

You can download Echo on the App Store now.