Dating app fatigue is real — we swipe through people as fast as we shop online. Only during late-night lonely hours do we find ourselves craving the artificial connections and superficial validation that dating apps commonly provide. But Beatmatch, a new geosocial dating app founded in Los Angeles, tries to match people based on something more: vibrations. 

Launched in 2021 by Chudi Iregbulem, a former Amazon employee, Beatmatch operates on the premise that music preferences are personality telltales. The app includes users’ music interests in their profiles and algorithmically matches people with similar tastes. 

Even its logo promotes the idea of building authentic connections with its references to Spotify’s stripped-down graphics and DJ terminology. “Beatmatching” is the practice of slowing or speeding up a song’s tempo to match another. 

The app currently has several thousand users across three active locations — New York City, Seattle and Los Angeles — and is targeted toward Gen Z for its receptiveness to meeting new people online.

CAS junior Chigy Nwogu, a Beatmatch campus ambassador, gave an example of one of the prompts in her profile.

“This one says ‘first round is on me if you listen to,’” Nwogu said. “And I put Key Glock ‘cause I like Key Glock.”

Linking Spotify or Apple Music to your profile enables the app to construct your Beatmatch persona. This is divided into three profile sections: top songs, top artist and top genres that together curate your life’s soundtrack. Afterward, the app asks a series of prompts to be displayed on your profile, similar to Hinge’s lighthearted yet red-flag-revealing questionnaire, but with songs or artists as answers. Some prompts include “I discovered this before anyone else” and “I put this on when I need to relax.” 

After uploading up to six pictures to your profile and setting dating parameters including gender, age and distance, using the app is similar to navigating Hinge’s pass-like mechanism and text message functions. But there’s an added embellishment — songs from your curated taste play aloud as your profile pops up. As you swipe, users can save new songs they find to their visible profile, adding the element of discovery to the app’s experience. 

What really sets Beatmatch apart from other dating apps that have come and gone is the app’s feature that instigates real-life meetups. It was Iregbulem’s love for music as a connective social fabric that inspired the app when he moved to Seattle and explored concerts in the city.

On the app, if you match with someone you’d like to meet, you can browse through local festivals or concerts together where websites to buy tickets are linked. Events that pique your interest or that you plan to attend can be saved and shown on your profile.

While most dating apps fuel hookup culture, Nwogu thinks that Beatmatch is less surface-level. 

“There’s nothing else to really go off of other than pictures,” Nwogu said. “[Other dating apps don’t] give you any insight into the person other than like, ‘Oh, I like the way they look.’ Even prompt features on some apps that try to draw personality out don’t paint a real enough picture.” 

Music talk on Beatmatch brings users beyond cookie-cutter conversation starters that so many modern-day singles get stuck in. The app lets us put the more intimate parts of our experience — the more fragile parts of our hearts — on the line. 

“Even the tougher emotions like sadness or anger — we tend to channel those through listening to music or making music,” Nwogu said. “Those are kind of the scarier emotions or the nasty emotions that people don’t really like to deal with at first.”

When you’re talking to someone on the app, there’s a shared understanding once you realize you’ve listened to the same Soundcloud rappers before they blew up or cried to the same viral playlists. It’s almost like reaching an unspoken understanding of an encoded emotional scaffolding. Beatmatch challenges the stigma surrounding dating apps and opens users up to the possibility that good vibrations might come their way too.

Contact Sabrina Lee at [email protected].