Hi there! My name is Janko Roettgers, and this is Lowpass. This week: A new music app looks familiar, and streaming services are adding more sports content.

One man’s 15-year quest to break down streaming music silos 

Wouldn’t it be great if you could exchange music recommendations with your friends, no matter whether they use Spotify, Apple Music, or Bandcamp? What if you could follow DJs and other tastemakers online and automatically turn their social media feeds into playlists? Or what if you could fine-tune your music recommendations with AI to only get recommendations for songs you’ve never played before?

Those are a few of the tasks the new music app Parachord is trying to take on by freeing music metadata from individual subscription service silos. In essence, Parachord wants to one day make songs universally playable and shareable, no matter what services you subscribe to. For now, Parachord is still very much in its infancy, with a series of unstable, experimental builds slowly laying the path to a beta release.

But the idea behind it is something Parachord mastermind J Herskowitz has been noodling over for a long time. Not only is Herskowitz a music tech veteran who’s worked at Spotify, LimeWire, and AOL Music, he also built this very app before. 

Back in 2011, Herskowitz banded together with a small group of likeminded misfits to build a music app called Tomahawk that used a plug-in architecture to tap into the music libraries of services like Rdio, Grooveshark, and Beats Music. The app also offered access to a social layer for music fans and allowed bands to share their latest tracks with universal links. 

It was a fascinating idea, but without a clear business model, it was ultimately not sustainable. Tomahawk development effectively ended in 2015. “We all needed to get jobs,” Herskowitz remembers. “I was very sad when Tomahawk went away.”

Except, it never fully went away.

As an open-source project, Tomahawk’s code continues to be available on GitHub. Around a month ago, Herskowitz decided to take another look at it, with some help from AI. “I fired up Claude Code, pointed it at the Tomahawk repo on GitHub, and said: Look at this, understand what it does, and let's see if we can rebuild it.”

Herskowitz freely admits he's not a developer in the traditional sense. “My whole career was in product management,” he says. “I never [wrote] real code.” But with Claude Code, he managed to rewrite Tomahawk and turn it into a working version of the new Parachord app within a couple of weeks, without hiring a developer.

The music industry has changed quite a bit over the past 15 years, as has the way many people listen to music. A bunch of once-promising streaming services have since disappeared. Consumers have largely flocked to three or four major services, with Spotify leading the pack. “When it comes to subscriptions, Spotify won,” Herskowitz says, acknowledging that people who only care about listening to their Discover Weekly likely won’t get a whole lot out of his app.

Parachord is built with a different audience in mind. People who buy songs on Bandcamp, track their listening history with Last.fm, and religiously follow bands on Bluesky. Back in his Tomahawk days, Herskowitz used to think there was a huge audience like this out there. Now, he realizes that it’s much more niche and at times even wonders if anyone other than himself really cares about the ideas behind Parachord. Not that that has stopped him. “That's the beauty of where we are today,” he says. “Technologically speaking, I can build an app for [just] me.”

Vibe-coding is often being talked about in the context of productivity apps, but there are some fascinating implications for the media space as well. Fifteen to 20 years ago, a bunch of developers tried to figure out new ways to consume music and video online, often with surprising results: Songbird turned MP3 blogs into playlists. Boxee pioneered universal movie and TV show libraries across streaming services. Miro experimented with alternative, P2P-powered distribution models for video podcasts. The list goes on.

In the end, many of these efforts were more passion projects than businesses. Back then, that  was often a death sentence for niche apps. These days, vibe coding can give these niche projects a new lease on life.

Of course, other things have changed, too: Most major media services are a lot more restrictive when it comes to data sharing and API access, forcing Herskowitz to rely on complicated work-arounds. Users who want Parachord to play nice with Spotify have to register it as a personal app in their Spotify developer profile, and then generate an individual API key. That personal key model also extends to the integration of AI services like Claude, Gemini, and ChatGPT.

The flip side: By relying on personal keys, Parachord requires far fewer resources. “I don’t need to limit features to paid tiers to cover third-party API or hosting bills - because there aren’t any,” Herskowitz wrote on LinkedIn last week, adding: “I’m building Parachord as a personal app because music listening is personal. Your taste, your library, your preferred sources, your friends, your desired social experiences around listening to music, your history—these aren’t things that should live inside someone else’s walled garden.”

And while Herskowitz is building Parachord as a personal passion project, he also hasn’t given up on the idea that there are business models waiting to be unlocked if you can break free of the silos of the big music streaming services.

“Nobody’s going to start a streaming business from the ground up to compete with Spotify,” he says. “[But there is] an opportunity for a little cottage industry to build experiences on top of the content that people are already paying for.”

Sports is growing across streaming

The amount of sports content available to stream keeps growing, with both paid and free streaming services both bulking up on matches and related content. That’s according to Gracenote, which noted in a news release out today that the amount of sports shows on paid subscription services grew by 12.5 percent between January 2025 and January 2026.

That may not sound all that much, especially considering that the same services also saw the number of movies and TV shows go up by 21 percent and 20 percent, respectively.

However, it’s also a bit of an unfair comparison: Streamers like Amazon or Netflix tend to treat sports league seasons similar to the way they catalog TV show seasons. Netflix, for instance, has all of the 52 RAW matches it carried live in 2025 organized in a single season. If you break out individual matches, sports content actually grew by 52 percent year-over-year.

And sports isn’t just growing behind the paywall. Sports content on FAST channels (free, ad-supported streaming channels) grew 32 percent year-over-year, according to Gracenote.

You can find more of Gracenote’s latest findings here.

What else

The new Fire TV UI is here. It brings more apps to the home screen, among other things.

Apple is working on Ray-Ban clone, AI pendant. The iPhone maker is reportedly looking to launch its own smart glasses next year; the company is also exploring a pendant with integrated camera.

Amazon’s new immersion reading feature syncs ebooks, audio books. The Kindle app now lets you read along to audio books from Audible.

The memory shortage is squeezing phone, PC & TV manufacturers. "Consumer electronics will see a large number of failures,” this year, according to the CEO of a memory maker.

Apple’s Podcasts app is embracing A/V hopping. Listeners can now seamlessly switch back and forth between the audio and video versions of a podcast, thanks to HLS.

The state of video gaming in 2026. Lots of interesting data from Matthew Ball, now available as an early-access slideshow.

How much is this link worth to you? You can now make your own offer on a sponsored link in this section of Lowpass (fully disclosed as such, of course) for as little as $75.

That’s it

Happy lunar new year to all those who celebrate! And happy carnival, and Ramadan Mubarak, of course. Speaking of lunar new year: Panda Express — I know, that transition made me cringe too, but hear me out — is celebrating the occasion with a special Lofi Girl collaboration … and what can I say? I do appreciate a marketing campaign that’s both smart and chill.

Thanks for reading, have a great weekend!