Imagine for a moment that you’ve just woken up to a sunny day where the light is streaming through a window and glistening off freshly fallen snow in the forest behind you and you want to play some calming morning tunes as you arise – how do you decide what music to turn on in this scenario?
Some may have a genre in mind, while others may have a playlist for the morning, but these options are limiting. In the former you are allowing one genre to play continuously as though a single genre actually defines morning while in the latter you are bound by the same songs you’ve always had.
Cue Moodnsap. Moodsnap is a generative and crowdsourced music application born in Boston that draws on the visuals of certain evocative pictures to help the user decide what they want to play. Rather than choosing from buckets of genres, or having the selection of one artist lead to the next, Moodsnap associates music with moods, feelings and above all, pictures. Moodsnap founder, David Blutenthal, believes it is these human elements of music selection that define the vision of the app and provide most other music apps lack:
“By displaying a spectrum of life’s emotions not in words but in photographs, we deliver an instinct-driven experience that makes deciding what to hear as easy as knowing how you feel.”
Of course, Moodsnap wouldn’t be the app it was if it didn’t take into account the human element of crowdsourcing. Blutenthal says that he and his team at Moodsnap, “believe that human curation at scale is the greatest way to amass a collection of incredible music.”
This notion manifests itself within Moodsnap through every user having a say in what the pictures represent musically. It gives users the ability to add songs to a picture which if other users don’t agree with they can click on a “sad face” icon which gives the option to declare that the song either didn’t fit the picture or didn’t fit your taste which allows the app to both learn your tastes and inform the songs that play on certain images. This process leads to each picture having a universally agreed upon set of music that is contextually diverse. Moodsnap also leverages some light competitive aspects in its app by providing leaderboards and rankings for those who contribute to the app frequently.
It is important to note though that the pictures themselves are an agreed upon set from Moodsnap and that users can’t add their own but the company plans to add many more so as not to limit selection. While there may not yet be many pictures, the idea of breaking down a picture into different personalities which is an aspect of the app that Blutenthal is excited to expand upon.
“We’ll soon be showing variation within the categories and seeing how the music assigned to each is different…for instance we can show what a ‘party’ looks like in many different ways: a hipster-esque looking house party, a rave, a dance club, a low key gathering of friends,” Blutenthal enthused.
It is in this trust of the community which Moodsnap celebrates that the app takes on a life of its own. Rather than an image conveying a single genre, Blutenthal has found that as the community adds and subtracts songs from a given image, diversity appears which can be hard to come by in other music generating apps.
“We purposefully designed the stations to test the hypothesis that it’s a better listening experience to celebrate genre diversity within the context of mood,” Blutenthal said.
Mood is something that Moodsnap (rightly so) gets entirely right. From the music selection associated with the images all the way down to the extremely clean design of the app, Moodnsap oozes simplicity and a certain level of humanness. Blutenthal explained it as having been designed so that users “feel good” when using the app – admittedly, I do.
Moodsnap generates music based off a partnership with The Echo Nest and Spotify. The Echo Nest is a music data mining company that provides a huge swathe of music and data for apps to help pair users with music and is also another Boston-born music and tech company. We like nothing better than to see two Boston-based companies collaborating to bring the best music experience to the users. Moodsnap also makes use of Spotify for the aforementioned music contributions as it searches through Spotify’s library for your additions but be warned that this app is only usable with a Spotify Premium membership.
When playing music based off the image I described earlier (which is my take on one of the many images in Moodsnap) I was immediately greeted by exactly what Blutenthal had described as the human element of Moodsnap – Thugz Mansion by 2Pac. At first glance this song may seem slightly out of place – do I really want to listen to 2Pac right as I’m waking up on a calm snowy day? The answer is actually and surprisingly, yes (if it’s no for you, just skip it, which you can do an unlimited amount of times). One might forget that this song is based off a gently plucked guitar and a very calming flow, not to mention the house in the picture looks to be quite a nice one (maybe a mansion?). With that in mind you can see how the users of this app would be able to agree that this song makes sense in the context of this image but an app that relies purely on data or genre would have a hard time understanding why this song would work.
If Thugz Mansion was not what you had in mind, you can either skip to the next song, or leverage Moodsnap’s music discovery capabilities by swiping up will provide a “more relaxing” track or swiping down which will seek out a track with “more energy”. This works the same way with all the images so if the initial selection has the right energy but isn’t a song you like you swipe through to the next song but if it you feel a change of attitude is in order you swipe up or down which provides the user with a lot of choice in an intuitive way.
Blutenthal credits his education and entrepreneurial experiences after moving to Boston in 2010 with helping him bring Moodsnap to life. After earning his MBA from the F.W. Olin School of Business at Babson, he found that the strong entrepreneurial culture ingrained in the program helped him find the mindset that would eventually lead to the creation of Moodsnap. He attended the Music Hack Day and Re-Think Music Conferences but grew frustrated that while the community and opportunity for music startups was there, it wasn’t being taken to the next level. Not one to sit back he decided to start the Boston Music Technology Group through Meetup.com which over the years has amassed over 250 members and was designed to bring together, “entrepreneurs, hackers, developers, designers, musicians, idea-ists, scientists,” in one place where they could, “play, learn, network, demo and keep an overall ear to the ground on what’s happening in Boston’s burgeoning music-tech scene,” Blutenthal explained.
It was through this group that Blutenthal ended up meeting half the team that now works at Moodsnap. These “idea-ists” have created an intriguing experiment in intuitive casual listening and discovery mixed with the power of groupthink. Moodsnap has carved out its own space and does so with a unique vision and an eye for intuition-based music discovery.
“Today’s music consumers are…overwhelmed by excessive choice. We offer a simpler and more intuitive solution to match great fitting songs to any moment. That’s what drives our vision.” Not to mention of course, the vision and moods of its users.