AudioVroom: Music Hack to iPhone App Building the Future of Social Music

SAN FRANCISCO, May 6, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- 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.

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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.

About SocialGenius, Inc.

SocialGenius, Inc. is a technology company. We make music discovery fun, easy and engaging through our mobile smartphone application, AudioVroom. Our products are based on our patent-pending "social playlisting engine" that knows who is in the room and plays the music those users care most about, while learning about social and location based listing patterns. For more information, visit www.audiovroom.com.

About The Echo Nest

The Echo Nest is a music intelligence company that powers smarter music applications for a wide range of customers -- including MTV, The BBC, MOG, Thumbplay, Warner Music Group and a community of about 7,000 independent app developers.

The Echo Nest's customers reach over 100,000,000 music fans every month. These application developers have built over 150 music applications on The Echo Nest platform, including music search, discovery, playlisting, location-based mobile applications, music games and analytics-driven marketing applications. Powered by the world's only machine learning system that actively reads about and listens to music everywhere on the web, The Echo Nest opens up a massive repository of dynamic music data to application developers to re-shape how we all experience music. The Echo Nest was co-founded in 2005 by two MIT Media Lab PhDs, Brian Whitman and Tristan Jehan. Winner of three National Science Foundation SBIR grants, The Echo Nest's investors include Matrix Partners and Commonwealth Capital Ventures, Argos Management and three co-founders of MIT Media Lab.

SOURCE The Echo Nest