Remote work has a ton of great benefits. It gives us the freedom to work from most any desk, couch, or kitchen table. It let’s us trade long commutes for important things like exercise, sleep, and time with friends and family. And asynchronous communication means fewer shoulder-tapping interruptions and more time to focus on deep, meaningful work. In short, working on a remote team has made us feel happier, healthier, and more productive.

But remote isn’t perfect. We struggle to find balance in our day, and it’s easy to feel isolated and lonely. There’s a more personal side of remote work that isn’t being considered — there’s a gap in the remote toolchain. We might point out that gap as some mishmash of in-person connection; like taking a coffee break, or catching up with co-workers before a meeting. This is part of it, but it’s more than that. We’re lacking tools that help us connect with our co-workers in fun and informal ways, which is an admittedly awkward and difficult problem to solve when you’re on a remote team.

Musicbox helps teams build stronger connections with each other by creating a shared environment for them to listen, share, and discuss music together. This environment and the conversations that stem from it offer a remote-friendly way to discover the people, not the Slack avatars, that you work with.

A good team is more than its output. We work to support each other, and we do that by knowing our collective strengths and weaknesses, our quirks and preferences. We know when someone is feeling down and how to pick them back up. This connection is the strength of our team. It doesn’t develop overnight.

In a physical office, connection is built incidentally — either by sharing a story with a fellow team member as you walk to a meeting or a recapping the weekend as you heat up your lunch in the cafeteria. This almost accidental, happenstance form of connection is an automatic strength of the physical office, and it’s a surprisingly good way to feel connected to people on your team. Unfortunately, we don’t have this luxury when we’re remote. Connection doesn’t happen by accident, it must be intentional.

Informal connection is hard when you’re remote, but we’re willing to give it a try. That’s why we’re building Musicbox, a digital place for folks to bond over their shared love music. In Musicbox it’s a song that sparks a memory about “that one time, listening to this album back in school”, or “when I was out on a walk last night I saw the coolest poster for this band.” It’s finding a great song to recommend to a co-worker based on something they said last week. We’re building Musicbox to help us share parts of ourselves with our coworkers.

We need tools that acknowledge the unique realities of what it means to be on a remote team. Tools that provide creative ways to connect, and that allow conversation to flow organically. Tools that are built around common experience and shared interests — and most importantly, tools that bring a bit of fun to our digital office.

What we have today doesn’t work. It's the well-intentioned, but unbearably awkward Zoom happy hours, the hundreds of disjointed “#food,” “#cat-pictures,” and “#off-topic” Slack channels. It's so, so many shared memes. Trying to recreate the physical world in a digital environment is the wrong approach.

We think it's time to explore the human side of remote work. This is why we're building Musicbox. We love music. It's a familiar and personal part of our workday — whether we’re writing code or finally getting through a stack of unread emails, we find comfort and company in the perfect song. Musicbox helps us share those moments while we listen together like we're clustered together around the same office radio. And Musicbox helps us share whatever else comes up along the way. We know that technology does not automatically solve nuanced human problems, but we think music is a common and familiar thread that can help us feel a little closer, a little less lonely, and a lot more connected.

See you soon!