MUMBAI: AudioVroom graduates from San Francisco’s Music Hack Day to the iTunes App Store. AudioVroom is a social music app that combines game mechanics with interactive radio stations powered by The Echo Nest’s deep music intelligence platform and is the first music app for the iPhone, iPad & iPod that lets friends create shared music stations reflecting their tastes by literally “bumping” phones.
AudioVroom was first demonstrated at last year’s San Francisco Music Hack Day. AudioVroom may have started as a simple audio hack last May, but one year later, it is a polished, consumer-friendly app available in the US iTunes app store for free, starting today.
AudioVroom users collaboratively create a radio station which they can enjoy at any time; on their stereo or on the go, their mutual playlist is just a click away. AudioVroom is powered by a unique partnership with the Echo Nest and utilizes 7digital’s 13-million-song music catalog.
Sharing musical tastes with your friends is just one fascinating aspect of the AudioVroom iOS app. AudioVroom differs from other music services by allowing users to play it like a social game, earning points redeemable for ad-free music listening. Bumping phones, collecting friends, and rating songs earns users points, or, if they prefer, users can purchase points for as little as .99 cents or subscribe for $40 per year for unlimited listening.
This first-of-its-kind music collaboration tool, which “makes music social, local and mobile” as its creator Marcos Lara says, just made the finals at the 2011 NYU Stern New Venture Competition and has attracted the attention of smart angel investors who committed an undisclosed amount of money to fund SocialGenius, Inc., co-founded by Lara, Sanem Alkan and Adam Lindsay to develop and distribute the AudioVroom app.