What It Means to Share a Playlist — Why I Built Sharing Into ChainPlay

"Do you like this kind of song?"

Words can only get you so far when describing your taste in music.

"I like mellow stuff," "I like something with a beat" — these phrases don't actually communicate anything. You have to hear it yourself. That's why we've always shared something, one way or another — mixtapes recorded on cassette, burned CDs, links sent through Melon. The medium changed, but the essence stayed the same.

"I want you to hear the things I love."

But what about now?

Music sharing is still very much alive. Sending a Spotify playlist link, sharing a YouTube playlist.

But honestly, there are some real inconveniences.

Spotify: without Premium, you either get ads or are stuck with shuffle-only. If the recipient doesn't have an account, they only get half the experience.
YouTube playlists: the feature itself is great, but creating and managing one is more of a hassle than it should be. And whoever receives it can't edit it or bring it into their own app.

And most of all — I was already using an app (ChainPlay) that plays YouTube videos back-to-back without YouTube Premium, and there was simply no way to share it with anyone else.

Where ChainPlay's share feature came from

Using ChainPlay myself, this thought kept coming up naturally.

"I wish I could send my 'Kids' chain to a friend who's also raising a toddler." "Can't I just send the chain of songs I'm listening to lately as a single link?"

It started as a simple "wouldn't it be convenient" thought. But building it, I realized it was more than that.

Sharing a playlist isn't just handing over a list of videos. It's handing over what someone's been watching lately, what mood they're into, what they're feeling.

Like posting the song you're currently listening to on Instagram, or sharing "this song right now" to your story — I came to think a playlist itself could be a form of self-expression.

The culture I wanted to build

While building the feature, I had a few scenes in mind.

Parents trading "kids' YouTube chains" with each other
Sending a friend your "songs I'm obsessed with lately" chain
Sharing a collection of focus-friendly videos for studying
Making a "my all-time favorite videos TOP 10" chain and posting it on social media

Right now, sending a link just shows the video list in the browser, and if you have the app, it opens right into it. Nothing grand or heavily social yet.

But I think that's the starting point.

The day a playlist becomes a business card

Someone once told me:

"If our music taste matches, I feel like I already know roughly what kind of person you are."

I think that's true. Taste tells you more than you'd expect — sense of humor, mood, energy level, worldview.

What I want is for a ChainPlay chain to play that role. For "just look at my chain" to be enough to convey what videos I enjoy, what mood I'm drawn to.

That's not happening yet, today. But the share feature is the first brick of that culture.

How it was actually built, technically

This post is about the "why" behind the feature, but for anyone curious, briefly:

I built it with no server. Chain data is base64-encoded into the URL, and a static GitHub Pages page acts as the passthrough. If the app is installed, it opens directly via deep link; if not, it links to the Play Store.

I wrote up the implementation details in a separate post → [Sharing App Content Without a Server — GitHub Pages + Android Deep Links]

Closing thoughts

Building a side project, every single feature ends up with a reason behind it.

Adding one share button might not sound like a big deal. But for me, it was the moment I found an answer to "why am I even building this."

Building a tool is great, but I realized once again that thinking about what culture that tool could create is even more fun.

I built it. Now I just have to use it to find out.