How Spiritune is making music medicine more accessible

There’s a lot of therapeutic power - and freedom - when it comes to music medicine. It’s a mental health tool that can be used as an alternative or supplement to pharmaceutical or psychotherapy interventions, and it can be self-administered at home, in the car, at the office, wherever you might be — on-demand, without supervision. 

Like an over-the-counter pill, but in your headphones. 

And there’s evidence that music medicine is very effective when it comes to managing stress, anxiety, and depression. 

But what makes a particular piece of music “medicine”? 

It can be easy to view certain music, especially music you love, as therapeutic. Who hasn’t curated a post-breakup or good vibes playlist at one point in time? That doesn’t inherently categorize it as “music medicine” or have the same biomedical effects. 

That’s because people don’t typically prioritize their therapeutic goals when choosing what music to listen to. For instance, if you’re feeling depressed, you might gravitate toward sad, downbeat music. It can be helpful in some cases, but it can also sustain or even increase sadness.

Plus, a lot of commercial music (read: what’s played on the radio/trending on Spotify) is created with the intention to attract listeners’ attention, which isn’t conducive if you’re listening to music while performing certain daily tasks. 

We saw an opportunity to make music medicine as accessible as a Spotify playlist, but using best practices of music therapy and advances in music neuroscience. Think: Mood matching through the iso principle; an emphasis on rhythm and groove; and tonal elements that convey emotional positivity and stability. Feeling anxious and want to feel calm? We’ve got a science-backed music experience for that.

Our music has been carefully designed to be broadly approachable. And by that, we mean we’ve incorporated simple and basic features of music that are popular across genres. In short, we aim to please. 

And our music is designed to meet you where you are. We understand that a lot of people listen to music while they’re doing other things (we call it functional music). We’re not looking to dominate your attention. We’re in the background, feeding you some enjoyable music that caters to the desired emotional state without detracting from what you’re doing.

We want to make Spiritune, and in turn music medicine, as accessible as possible. So we didn’t just make broadly appealing music, we put it in an app. That’s affordable. That meets you where you are, geographically and emotionally. And can be done without therapeutic intervention (i.e. a doctor or a therapist). 

We believe the future of music medicine is not just in its effectiveness. It’s in its simplicity.