Imagine you’re driving down the road listening to your favorite country radio station (or classical, or rock, or rap-whatever) and you hear a new tune that catches your interest.
“I’d buy that album,” you think to yourself, “if I just knew who sang it.”
Soon, you’ll be able to find out.
Startup MusiKube L.L.C. is in the early stages of selling its new music identification technology, called fPrint. The company said the technology can sample ambient music, convert it into a digital data structure and then match it against more than 2 million songs.
And in the first quarter of next year, MusiKube plans to make the technology commercially available through a toll-free 1-800 number. Users will be able to dial the number, hold their phone up to the source of the music for 10 seconds, and find out the musician behind that tuneful country twang (or rock, rap-whatever). Users can be alerted of the musician’s identity as well as the song title and album name through a text message.
Sunjay Guleria, MusiKube’s vice president of marketing, said the service will give music lovers a chance to track down the melodies they find interesting. And, he said, it could lead to additional album and song sales for the beleaguered record industry.
MusiKube teamed with Loudeye Corp. to develop its music identification technology. Loudeye manages a digital database of more than 2 million songs, including country favorites from Toby Keith to Merle Haggard. MusiKube developed a sound capturing technology that can rapidly search through the database until the correct tune is found. Guleria said the database is updated with all the latest songs, and that it is highly unlikely a user would call with a song that is not in the database, especially in an era of giant media conglomerates and relaxed rules for radio station ownership.
Such technology is not new, however. United Kingdom company Shazam Entertainment Ltd. offers a similar service in Europe, which works through the 2580 short code. But the scope of MusiKube’s ambitions does not lie solely on a toll-free number for music identification.
Indeed, MusiKube plans to make no revenues from the commercial availability of its music service. The company is pursuing an extremely diverse sales strategy, one that includes potential deals with wireless carriers, radio station operators, record stores and record labels.
“All these channels are intertwined,” Guleria said.
MusiKube is selling its fPrint technology to wireless carriers as a white label service, allowing operators to offer music identification-and potentially album purchases-as a premium service to their subscribers. For radio station operators, MusiKube is selling the ability to keep automated track of the music played over the air, a process that is now catalogued by a station employee. For record stores, MusiKube is selling a system that works over a wireless personal digital assistant and allows store shoppers to sample songs by scanning the album’s bar code. Next month, the Virgin record store in San Francisco plans to launch the browsing service. And finally, MusiKube is ultimately selling the technology to record labels, which would allow them to track what music consumers are searching for and are interested in.
“We’d really like to get as many users as possible,” Guleria said. “What we’d really like to do is turn this into a mobile marketing service for the record labels.”
And those are just a few of the business models possible through MusiKube’s technology, Guleria said, promising the company would announce additional features and function in the future. But to jumpstart its business, MusiKube first wants to demonstrate that its technology works and is appealing to users-which is the real motivation behind the launch of the toll-free music identification number.
