Grammy MusicMapper App: Location, location, location
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Twitter is so 2010.
This year, location is all the rage. The folks putting on the Grammy Awards have released a mobile application to zero in on the geo-location trend.
Called MusicMapper, the idea is for people to tag locations on a map where they heard a memorable piece of music, or when a song played in the background during a key event.
Wandering through the map gives a Whitman’s Sampler of random personal histories. One user, Calinative, tagged a location in Santa Ana with the song ‘I’m So Into You,’ with a note about walking home from school with her first crush. Another tag in Garden Grove showed where Lndsygblr bought her first cassette single, ‘Just a Girl’ by No Doubt, because her older sister used to listen to that song.
The app is for Android phones and iPhones, but the Android version gives users an augmented reality view. Switch on the camera, point it in any direction and up pops the nearest snippets of memories. As you move the phone around, the app surfaces the nearest tags in the direction that the camera is pointed.
Users can listen to a 30-second sample of the song that’s been tagged. That feature comes courtesy of Rdio, a San Francisco music-streaming service founded by Janus Friis and Niklas Zenstrom, who also founded Skype and Kazaa. For Grammy addicts, Rdio has a monster playlist of 281 Grammy-nominated songs, nearly all of this year’s contenders. Anyone can listen to 30-second samples of the songs for free.
MusicMapper is just one of many social media projects by the Recording Academy to promote the 53rd Grammy Awards show, set for Feb. 13 at the Staples Center. Its online efforts last year helped to boost the show’s television ratings by more than 35%, to 26 million U.S. viewers, according to Evan Greene, the academy’s chief marketer.
‘For the last several years, our viewership among teens and young adults has grown,’ Green said.
-- Alex Pham
twitter.com/AlexPham