soundtrckr

primo in italiano, y ahora en español

Soundtrckr's journey through the Romance languages is proceeding apace with a quick shout-out from the good people at Seetio. Here's the whole page translated via Google, and here's our in-house intuitive edit thereof:

With soundtrckr, you can geotag the music you're listening to at any given time so that people passing through the same places can listen in on the same tunes. You can share your favorite music with your friends or with everyone, or check out what people are listening to in the area where you are. You can also create your own little "virtual radio station" where people can enjoy your favorite songs. It's a new twist to the ability to share music via mobile phone, which we love. [Seetio]

Thanks Seetio!

In other news, happy New Year! We will probably be making lots of Prince stations to prepare, and wish you all a relaxing and refreshing/quiet and contemplative/heedlessly debauched 2010 depending on how you get down.

Cheers to all!

Wired, Locational Awareness, The Law

Soundtrckr got a great write-up in Wired this week! The article, by Eliot Van Buskirk, shows us a little love and makes some salient points about the exploding mobile/geosocial marketplace:

The internet removed a sense of place from our lives by connecting people and content from everywhere, but location-aware smartphones are changing that by affixing tweets, pictures, business listings — and now songs — to specific real-world locations.

An exciting new iPhone app by Soundtrckr mashes maps and internet radio, letting listeners geotag stations and songs, and listen to other users’ stations based on location. It’s a simple yet powerful concept, which allows you to see what your neighbors (or people anywhere) are listening to, tune in, leave comments and become friends. [Wired]

There's also a couple paragraphs on the vagaries of music licensing law as it relates to on-demand versus streaming services. There are massive legal and financial distinctions here, all of which should be kept in mind when considering the changing landscape of the digital music market.

...internet radio services are relatively doing well because they enjoy far lower per-song royalty rates than on-demand music services — they’re closer to a radio than an encyclopedic iPod, so they pay less. (The difference between the two types of service is why, when people say Spotify will compete with Pandora, they have no idea what they’re talking about.) [Wired]

And when you start thinking about international expansion, these issues get even weirder. The fragmentation of the music market into national silos necessitates the renegotiation of licenses for each individual country where a company wants to do business. This is a major hurdle for socially-inclined music services, as it limits the sharing of content across borders and hinders the creation of a truly global user community.

In any event, with so many web-based music services being acquired by major media companies, it will be interesting to see how all of this plays out during 2010.

soundtrckr is live!

Blending the best elements of Internet radio, social networks, and location-based mobile apps, soundtrckr has launched a free application and website that allows users to connect their mobile devices to the social and geographic aspects of music discovery.

Users can create and broadcast their own fully licensed radio stations, tap into the streams of other users, and geo-tag places with songs. All content can be shared on social networks such as Twitter and Facebook.

Soundtrckr is available on the iTunes Apps store for the iPhone, the iPod Touch, Macs, and PCs at: http://itunes.apple.com/app/soundtrckr/id339473336?mt=8. The website is also live at http://www.soundtrckr.com. New applications for Android, Blackberry, and Windows Mobile will be available in 2010.

Designed for the mobile environment, soundtrckr allows users, content owners, sponsors, partners, and licensors to interact in local and targeted ways. Soundtrckr users can create a musical map of their favorite places by associating songs to locations. One person can tag the route of their morning jog with the songs they listen to while running, and another can tag their neighborhood club with music by upcoming acts. All users can share and experience each other’s tags and music, and a ranking system will reward the most active and followed broadcasters.

"Music is a shared experience, a way to communicate and connect. It's intimately tied to the people and places in our daily lives, and soundtrckr is the first application that recognizes and facilitates this connection in a concrete way,” said soundtrckr CEO Daniele Calabrese. "Soundtrckr makes our cities and friends active participants in the way we experience music."

Chief Operating Officer Ken Manning agrees. "There is so much music available to consumers right now, with few good ways to find the material that's right for your tastes. Soundtrckr solves this problem by allowing you to listen to the tunes your friends are into."

Through its partnership with MediaNet, soundtrckr offers access to a music catalog featuring millions of songs from major and independent labels, aggregators, and distributors. Further licenses are in place with publishing clearinghouses including American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP), Broadcast Music, Inc. (BMI), SESAC, Inc., and Sound Exchange.

“We are committed to provide the best experience for both users and performers. Soundtrckr will provide legally licensed offerings for users and fair compensation to content owners, publishers, and partners,” said Chief Financial Officer David Porter.

The company’s management team has deep experience in the music and mobile sector. Mr. Calabrese is a former World Bank Communication Officer and Project Manager. Chief Operating Officer Ken Manning is also the founder and chairman of betterPropaganda Music, a leading music discovery site with relationships with more than 600 major and independent labels. Chief Financial Officer David Porter is the founder and CEO of online music mix-tape company 8tracks, and previously served as a manager and director of business development at Internet radio network Live365.

Soundtrckr has received funding from Lumu Invest in Luxembourg, Romulus Capital in Boston, and has recently completed an angel round in the US and Italy. The company was honored as the second most innovative startup of 2009 at the SMAU high-tech trade show in Milan.

"Global Map of Social Web" from TrendStream

Adam Ostrow at Mashable shared a delectable infographic from TrendStream today. Besides being all pretty, it offers some surprising insights on Chinese digital internalism, Japanese early-adopterism, and the Twitter hype-to-reality ratio.