A group of Cornell students and alumni has taken it upon itself to challenge current forms of music recommendation platforms and applications — such as Pandora.com — with its own dot.com venture, Additune.com.
Additune is a Mac-only application that allows people to expand their playlists and discover new music, emphasized Peter Brodsky grad, co-creator of the program. The Additune application analyzes playlists on iTunes and then offers a number of recommended tracks to the user, which can be listened to for thirty seconds (as per licensing laws) or purchased.
The company receives a percentage of the price of each song purchased by the user. Because of this, Brodsky explained, it’s in the company’s best interest to ensure the quality of the application’s recommendations.
“We want to understand the user and his or her complex, unique taste,” Brodsky said. “And, more than that, we want to understand the instant gratification culture.”
Discovering the “complex, unique taste” of Additune’s users is a matter of determining genre. Brodsky admits that there are ten to twelve broad musical genres, such as hip-hop, r & b, top 40 and country. But, Additune.com considers playlists as personal as diaries: “When you go through someone’s playlist you can tell a lot about a person,” Brodsky said.
Using this as a premise, Additune makes genres unique to each user.
“You get a sense of what a person’s like by seeing what they played last,” said Anjana Rajan ’08, who works in marketing for Additune.com.
“The application intuits the user’s preference for music on its own and intuits the user’s mood on its own,” Brodsky said.
Brodsky said that unlike Additune’s competitors, Additune users do not have to “constantly teach the system” their musical tastes — i.e. explicitly recommend songs by giving positive or negative signals to particular tracks.
The program is also easy to use, according to Brodsky. Once the application is downloaded from Additune.com, it works alongside iTunes. There is additionally no need to register or sign up for Additune.com. In fact, Additune prides itself on the anonymity granted and privacy given to its users.
“The fact that we have users in over 20 countries attests to how easy the program is to use,” said Justin Smithline JGSM ’04, the corporate executive officer for Additune.com.
Rajan said that the fact that Additune users have to purchase recommended songs to listen to them beyond thirty seconds keeps the company out of hot water with the Recording Industry Association of America and international music licensing laws.
Additune.com launched a month and a half ago and currently has 4,500 users — numbers that “bode well” for Additune.com, Smithline said. Users were attracted to the application through blog releases of the application and, as Brodsky said, “the magic of Google.” Brodsky noted that he and Smithline wanted a “low-key user recruitment campaign” so that they could first iron out all of the application’s kinks.
Fifty percent of the songs Additune.com users click on to preview are purchased, according to Brodsky. This trumps purchase rates of recommendation services such as iTunes: “We’re orders of magnitude ahead,” Brodsky said.
The concept for the application began last February, according to Brodsky. Brodsky said that half a year before last February he submitted a bug report to Apple — the bug report asked Apple to provide a functionality of the sort Additune provides.
“I got in touch with Apple as an iTunes user in the hope that Apple would build something with an Additune functionality into iTunes,” Brodsky said. “But, it never happened.”
But Brodsky said he and Smithline love the idea of entrepreneurship and created the Additune functionality on their own.
“Being an entrepreneur is so much fun,” Brodsky said. “There’s no corporate burdens and its just nice to set out on your own course. You work a lot, but it’s worth it.”
Smithline explained that Additune.com is currently in its angel investment round — that means the company is seeking a wealthy individual to back up the company. Smithline also explained an “angel investor” is a type of venture capitalist.
The number of the company’s employees tallies in at four, going on five with the up-and-coming hiring of another software developer.
In the future, Additune plans on making an application that works for Windows.