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Name: Moodagent
Quick Pitch: Moodagent creates playlists based on your mood.
Genius Idea: A proprietary system categorizes any tune — even those never before released.
The rise of digital music has been the death of the album. The total number of albums sold in 2010 was the lowest since Nielsen SoundScan began compiling data in 1993. The only category on the rise last year — though just by a mere 1% — was digital singles.
"The album is lost when the tracks are being cherry-picked," explains Peter Berg Steffensen, co-creator of Danish company Moodagent. "We started the company trying to create interesting playlists that have the same effect as an album."
Steffensen and co-founder Michael Henderson spent four years perfecting a system that measures each tune in five basic categories: how sensual, tender, happy or angry it is, as well as its tempo. With the Moodagent app, users adjust bars representing each of these qualities, in a bid to match their current mood. Based on their selections, the app assembles a playlist from their music libraries.
Unlike music discovery services such as Pandora, Moodagent has an indexing engine — rather than a human — categorize the songs. The app has already categorized more than 1 billion songs, which means it can instantly adapt to users' music libraries.
Does it work? In a test run, yes. The app delivered Israel Kamakawiwo'ole's "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" when "tender" was called for, and The Early November's "Hair" when I switched moods to Happy. It's a little harder to say whether Dispatch's "The General" was equal parts sensual and happy, as the app claims.
In any case, the app has proved sufficient enough for Nokia to make it a default option on some phones in 2009 and for more than 5 million people to download its Android, iPhone and Nokia versions (BlackBerry, Web OS, and Windows versions are in the works).
Despite this popularity, Moodagent's parent company, Syntonetic, is not yet profitable. Current revenue streams include royalty fees from Nokia phones preloaded with the app, advertising revenue from a free version of the app and the ad-free version for 99 cents.
In the future, the Danish company plans to explore "mood-based" advertising as well as other revenue-earning features. One popular model in music discovery services is to refer users to music they might like in order to collect referral fees from music retailers.
A new version of the Moodagent iPhone app is scheduled for next week.
Image courtesy of iStockphoto, mooneydriver
Series Supported by Microsoft BizSpark
The Spark of Genius Series highlights a unique feature of startups and is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark, a startup program that gives you three-year access to the latest Microsoft development tools, as well as connecting you to a nationwide network of investors and incubators. There are no upfront costs, so if your business is privately owned, less than three years old, and generates less than U.S.$1 million in annual revenue, you can sign up today.