Ivy | Share and Discover Music

General

What is Ivy?

Ivy is a music-sharing platform that helps people discover music through friendly competition.

People create leagues, where each week every player submits a song during the week (Mon-Thu), and votes for their favorite on the weekend (Fri-Sun).

Whoever's submission receives the most votes from the other players wins that week.

Why are you making Ivy?

We think the current music sharing experience blows, but is solvable.

All the current solutions come up short, usually due to being either too active, or too passive.

Ivy is designed to facilitate both passive and active music discovery, by rewarding people for finding great music and by showing them what their friends' favorite songs are.

Can I change the time format for my league?

We're not allowing people to change the format, because we want to keep it simple as we introduce people to the concept.

We think the different possibilites for league formats are really exciting, and in the future we'd like to give people complete control over it.

Set-Up

I don't have a Spotify, can I still use Ivy?

For sure! Creating leagues requires a Spotify account, but you can still join leagues without one.

Why would I want public voting?

Public voting allows anyone with an Ivy account to vote in that league, and it also makes voting optional for the players submitting songs.

It's designed to help people who want to use Ivy as an engagement tool for larger communities.

How do I make another player Admin?

We haven’t built this functionality yet.

Let someone at Ivy know if you need this done.

Can I invite people after I create a league?

Yeah, you can add people to the Invite List from Edit Invites in the 3-dot Menu Icon from the League homepage.

Submission

When do I submit songs?

Monday - Thursday

Leagues are based around weeks. You submit songs during the week (Monday-Thursday), then vote on the weekend (Friday-Sunday)

Can I submit a song that was submitted in a previous week?

We don't allow people to submit songs that have already been submitted in a League.

Resubmitting songs is lame, conflicts with core values of Ivy, and you'd probably lose anyway.

What happens if I forget to submit?

If you forget to submit, you should still vote for that week!

Voting

What should I do if someone submitted a song I already know?

This is a common question, but ultimately we leave it up to you.

We think that some value should be subtracted based on how well you know the song.

However, if the difference between how much you like the song and how much you like the other submissions is larger than the perceived cost of its familiarity, you should feel confident in voting for it.

What happens if I don’t vote?

If you don’t vote, you won’t be eligible to win that week.

Apple Music

How does Ivy work with Apple Music?

The first person using Apple Music to join a league becomes the Apple Music rep for that league, which means we'll use their Apple Music account to create the Apple versions of both the aggregate and weekly playlists.

Links to Apple Music playlists can only be manually created in their UI, and we are also unable to add them to your library automatically. Therefore, the league's rep must manually share the playlists with any other Apple Music users in the league.

You can still open songs in Apple Music by clicking them individually, but this playlist situation is unavoidable due to Apple Music's API design.

What happens if the rep leaves the league?

If there are players remaining who use Apple Music, a new rep is randomly selected whose account we'll use to create the playlists.

When I click on the playlist links, it takes me to the Spotify version?

Shareable links to Apple Music playlists can only be created in their UI, so we're only able to link from Ivy to the Apple Music playlists for the league's rep.

Why do some songs take me to Spotify instead of Apple Music?

This will only occur when we don't have an Apple Music link for the recording, which means that either Apple doesn't offer it, or it was submitted before we started supporting Apple Music.

FAQ