Before it’s February launch, Quadio, a brand new music sharing and streaming service for college students, stopped in Allendale to hear the voices and feedback of the Grand Valley State University student body. 

GVSU students currently stream music through their choice of popular music streaming service, such as Spotify or Apple Music. However, Quadio Media is offering a music streaming service which supports student musicians along the way. 

Through this service, students can publish music, as well as discover music created by fellow members of the GVSU community. The service will be open to any student with a college email address ending in “.edu”. This email address will also help filter students into their specific campus community. For students looking to branch out, searches can be expanded to help users find artists outside of their campus community. 

A  member of the Quadio Artist Relations Team George Taylor said one of the missions of Quadio is to make it easier for artists to network and collaborate with other artists in their community. 

“We’re hoping to become a social network for musicians,” said Taylor. “LinkedIn, Facebook and SoundCloud combined is the lane we’re targeting.”

Joe Welch and a few partners began building Quadio in Oct. 2018. The idea was born after Welch released an original song and received a positive reaction by his campus community at Williams College in Massachusetts. “He wanted to build a platform that tapped into that energy,” Taylor said.

The Quadio Media team has been working on funding the platform for the last two years. The Quadio Media office is in Manhattan and has 50 full-time employees. They plan to launch Jan. 14 as a beta, followed by their full launch in February. 

There are currently 210 Quadio campus reps across the nation. GVSU students have the opportunity to be Quadio campus reps by following the steps on their website and partaking in an interview with the director of campus reps. 

“Our biggest thing before we launched was to hear from the communities we’re saying we’re trying to change. We didn’t want to just sit in New York and say we’re going to change all of these communities without talking to people involved from them,” said Taylor. 

Taylor and other representatives from Quadio Media are on a nationwide tour to not only spread the word about this service, but to seek feedback from college students. This tour is dedicated to using student feedback in order to polish the development of Quadio before it launches.