Mighty Audio (often marketed and stylized as Mighty) is an American company based in

Los Angeles, California Los Angeles ( ; es, Los Ángeles, link=no , ), often referred to by its initials L.A., is the largest city in the state of California and the second most populous city in the United States after New York City, as well as one of the world' ...

, known for its product Mighty, a

portable audio player A portable audio player is a personal mobile device that allows the user to listen to recorded audio while mobile. Sometimes a distinction is made between a ''portable'' player, battery-powered and with one or more small loudspeakers, and a ''pers ...

that plays

Spotify Spotify (; ) is a proprietary Swedish audio streaming and media services provider founded on 23 April 2006 by Daniel Ek and Martin Lorentzon. It is one of the largest music streaming service providers, with over 456 million monthly active us ...

and

Amazon Music Amazon Music (previously Amazon MP3) is a music streaming platform and online music store operated by Amazon. Launched in public beta on September 25, 2007, in January 2008 it became the first music store to sell music without digital rights man ...

without a phone. The company was Spotify's first partner in the offline streaming music space when they publicly launched in July 2017.

Products

Mighty

Mighty Audio is one of two official partners of Spotify in the offline streaming space, the other being

Samsung The Samsung Group (or simply Samsung) ( ko, 삼성 ) is a South Korean multinational manufacturing conglomerate headquartered in Samsung Town, Seoul, South Korea. It comprises numerous affiliated businesses, most of them united under the ...

. The first product Mighty is 1.5 x 1.5 inches, 0.6 ounces, drop and water resistant, Bluetooth and WiFi enabled, has an 8GB storage capacity, and up to 5 hours of battery life. Mighty Audio offers a

mobile app A mobile application or app is a computer program or software application designed to run on a mobile device such as a phone, tablet, or watch. Mobile applications often stand in contrast to desktop applications which are designed to run on d ...

for

iOS iOS (formerly iPhone OS) is a mobile operating system created and developed by Apple Inc. exclusively for its hardware. It is the operating system that powers many of the company's mobile devices, including the iPhone; the term also includes ...

and Android that is used to wirelessly sync Spotify Music to the Mighty via the player's

Bluetooth Bluetooth is a short-range wireless technology standard that is used for exchanging data between fixed and mobile devices over short distances and building personal area networks (PANs). In the most widely used mode, transmission power is limi ...

and

Wi-Fi Wi-Fi () is a family of wireless network protocols, based on the IEEE 802.11 family of standards, which are commonly used for local area networking of devices and Internet access, allowing nearby digital devices to exchange data by radio wave ...

. Once the app is installed on your phone, the rest of the setup process takes about 10 minutes. That includes creating a Mighty account, renaming your device something only you will understand, connecting it to Wi-Fi, downloading updates and linking your Spotify account. Once all of that is done, all you have to do is select which playlists to sync from Spotify to Mighty. Once the music is stored on Mighty, the user no longer needs a phone or Internet connection for music playback. Mighty has a 3.5mm headset jack and also works with Bluetooth headphones. Mighty makes Spotify mobile without using any of your phone's storage, battery or data.

History

Development

The company was founded by Anthony Mendelson, an ex-Google employee. The original Mighty was designed based on the idea that running or working out with a smartphone was not a great experience with no solution at the time to listen to streaming music outside of the phone. The product has also been called the “iPod Shuffle for Spotify”, especially as the Shuffle was discontinued by Apple.

Funding

Mighty Audio raised $300,101 through a Kickstarter campaign running from February 22, 2016, to March 23, 2016. The company followed this by raising an additional $295,702 on Indiegogo and sold an additional $300,000 in pre-orders from November 12, 2016, to June 23, 2016. On February 1, 2018, it was announced that the company was part of the Techstars Music Class of 2018.

Release Delay

Although the release date of Mighty for its Kickstarter and Indiegogo backers was November 2016, the product was not released until July 2017. The company had to rebuild the product alongside Spotify and go through the Spotify certification process, which lasted 8 months.

Reception

Spotify

The device is currently limited to

and

content and users with a Spotify Premium account. Mighty can only currently sync playlists, not albums or individual tracks. The workaround is to add albums or songs to a playlist and sync the playlist.

Shuffle

The device was met with criticism when it first launched as it did not have a shuffle feature. Shuffle functionality was added in September 2017 via a software update.

Connectivity

Users setting up their Mightys with the mobile app experienced connectivity issues. The company released software updates to address these connectivity issues.

Software Releases

The company released several minor software updates and a major 1.0 software update in September 2017. Items included in this update were shuffle functionality, aux cable support for speakers, improved battery life, connectivity stability fixes, the ability to sync individual playlists rather than everything loaded onto Mighty, and automatic playlist updates to the device, dubbed “Stay Fresh” by the company.

References

External links

* {{Official website Music technology Technology companies based in Greater Los Angeles American companies established in 2015