The internet removed a sense of place from our lives by connecting people and content from everywhere, but location-aware smartphones equiped with 3G networks and high speed are changing that by affixing tweets, pictures, business listings and now songs to specific real-world locations on the geo maps.An exciting new iPhone application launched 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.
So far, geotagging apps have focused on photos and tweets, and Soundtrckr is the only geotagging music app in the iTunes App Store. But it’s only a matter of time until its location-aware music features find their way into Pandora (currently the top free music app for iPhone) and other music-streaming mobile apps, because it gives users a useful new way to listen, discover new music and meet each other. Soundtrckr is worth a free download by any music fan with an iPhone , because of its seamless overlay of songs, stations and listeners on Google Maps.
This application makes our cities and friends active participants in the way we experience music.”
Like other online radio station as long as the song resides in your memory we can create a station of our choice. Our project would take care of this drawback as all songs would be streamed which users have uploaded.
The whole point of streaming music to your phone is that you don’t have to use up its storage with music files, so Soundtrckr really should include a way to add songs and artists that aren’t already on your phone — after all, an API from MediaNet (formerly MusicNet) already provides metadata and the songs themselves to the service. Also, there’s currently no way to shape stations with ratings, and the service lacks an offline playback mode.
Users can geotag the currently playing song on any station so that others can listen to what they heard at that spot (30-second previews), leave comments about the song, or buy it from iTunes. As for station playback, there are no length limitations. You can listen to your own stations, your friends’ stations, or the stations of any user you find on the map, or browse by people, places or stations. The play/pause button and current-song information follow you through every screen, which is a nice touch.
If one wants, he can send any person or hisother friends messages and songs through the service.
Music fans aren’t the only ones who will like Soundtrckr. It could also give marketers a valuable way to track the genesis of a hits and popularity of genres by neighborhood and let them know where to put advertisements and flyers for an upcoming show. Labels and marketers access similar data from file sharing networks and legitimate services by IP address, but mobile-phone geotagging offers far more precision.
Pandora and other 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.)
Adding location awareness to social music streaming, already a rare strong suit for music startups, will make them even more potent by giving listeners another efficient way to discover music — and each other. And this time around, it matters where you are.
