Nowadays, music discovery can be a magical, yet completely disconnected, experience. There are tools to find the most popular music from blogs, algorithms to suggest music according to characteristics and custom created lists and channels made by curators. Still, something integral is missing – your friends.
Once upon a time – long before peer-to-peer file sharing services hit the Web – the way to discover music was by trading mix tapes with friends. Nowadays, you might burn a CD for a friend but, as our music collections increasingly move into the cloud, it’s becoming harder and harder to share your musical tastes with your friends. AudioVroom wants to change this and bring your friends to the music discovery experience of apps like Pandora.
AudioVroom, which should be available for iOS in the next couple of weeks, offers users the ability to create custom playlists of streaming music based on friends musical tastes. AudioVroom builds a profile of each user’s musical tastes according to a few different methods. First, it can look at your iTunes library and build a profile by examining artist frequency, play counts, skip counts and star ratings. If you don’t want it to look at your library, it can build a taste profile according to what you “love” and “fail” while using the app to play friends’ stations. If neither of those fit your fancy, AudioVroom co-founder and CEO Marcos Lara says that the company is working on integrating Facebook and Last.fm to pull in your musical preferences.
Once the app has your musical tastes pinned down, you can begin sharing with friends. AudioVroom lets users “bump” their phones with each other (using the Bump API) to exchange profile information. From there, it looks at common interests, finds intersections and creates custom stations according to these points.
The app has yet to hit the App Store shelves but we got to hear a bit about it and give it a try and we’re looking forward to seeing what new music we might find by simply bumping our phone with our friends. Lara says that an HTML5 version is on the way for Android phones, as well as a Facebook app.
For now, all we can do is wait for it to hit the app store so we can convince all of our friends to download it and stop listening to that same old Pandora station day after day.
