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This is Lowpass by Janko Roettgers, a newsletter on the ever-evolving intersection of tech and entertainment, syndicated just for The Verge subscribers once a week.
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.
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.
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