The GRAMMYs MusicMapper App Tracks Melodic Memories

posted in: Music News

Everyone seems to be jumping onto the geo-tagging trend in the past few months. First there was Foursquare, then Facebook Places and now the GRAMMYs? Surprising but true. The GRAMMYs are teaming up with Internet radio startup Rdio for their MusicMapper app. The concept gets points for a few reasons: it keeps the GRAMMYs looking fresh and up-to-date with social networking (and the audience they should be courting), it’s admittedly clever in crowd-sourcing a lot of content from an active user base and, honestly, the idea is pretty cute. Users who download the app tag locations on a map with music that carries some personal meaning to them. Just browsing for a few seconds, one can come upon a myriad of different responses ” a young mother posting the perfect song to lull her baby to slumber, a fan at the University of Maryland posting Gary Glitter’s “Rock and Roll Part 2” with the note Fear the turtle!!!,  a young man in Manhattan posting the song by UK crooner Jamie Lidell that he heard as he proposed to his fiancé.

And then of course, some pre-teen girl posted about Justin Beiber and how totes cute he was.

Songs can be heard in 30 second snippets for people who don’t already have the app. The app is available for download for iPhone and Android users. Android users get a nice little bonus too as the app is integrated into their augmented reality view. Android users can simply point their camera in any direction and be directed to the nearest tagged song automatically.

This isn’t the first major social media initiative the GRAMMYs have rolled out. In the past two years the GRAMMYs have tried to make themselves as visible as possible in social media during the lead up to each year’s ceremony. Last year, the GRAMMYs crowd-sourced fan videos and Twitter comments to form literal artist profiles on WE’RE ALL FANS. The site invited users to form their own profiles, made up of their favorite songs (musical DNA) and to share their profile with friends. While it doesn’t look like the site is getting an update this year, the GRAMMYs credits projects like these with boosting their ratings for the 2010 awards show by 35 percent. Not only are the GRAMMYs making every move to stay technologically in step with their fan base, but they’re seeing tangible rewards for their effort. And if that means we get to play with stuff like MusicMapper, then kudos to that.