Miliao Group Messaging App Adds Music Sharing Between Buddies

Two of China’s coolest startups have joined hands to make it easier for friends to share music via mobile messaging. In the deal, songs from Xiami (a Last FM-like service) can be browsed and shared within the Miliao group messaging app.

Miliao is a product of Xiaomi (not to be confused with ‘Xiami’), makers of the virally-popular Xiaomi phone, and is a standalone app for iOS, Android, and Symbian, as well as being preinstalled on the Xiaomi phone. Now in the latest app update, Miliao users can find and send music from Xiami that can be received by buddies in the form of an embedded player in the group messaging app (pictured above).

In an announcement on the Xiami blog, it points out that music can be shared from within the Miliao app by first picking a friend, clicking on ‘share music,’ and then searching for and selecting a song of your choice. Neither the sender nor receiver needs to be signed-in as a member to the music-streaming service in order to do this. But of course, Xiami will be hoping for a boost in user numbers after people try this out. Last month, in related news, it launched a social DJ web app.

Sending music to a friend has to be one of the hardest things to do in the digital social realm (unless you have an Android device and can easily send the mp3 file as an attachment, I guess), so it sounds like a neat idea to make this suddenly so straight-forward. Well, provided your buddies do indeed use Miliao.

Though the app is pretty popular, China’s most-used group messaging app is Tencent’s (HKG:0700) Weixin, which hit 50 million registered users at the end of last year.