I met Dave while I was at the Rdio happy hour during SXSW. From talking to him, it seemed like he had the coolest music app that someone had pitched to me. Which app am I referring to…Discovr. Watch the video below, but essentially, is a social music discovery app where users can discover new music through a unique mapping system based on search function (band name or keyword).
Since Dave is based out of Perth, Australia, we connected through email for another 3 questions with…
1. How did the idea of creating a map for music discovery come about?
OK. So before I was making apps I was working as a marine biologist for the Australia Federal Government. One of the things I was doing was looking at large datasets of biological community data and trying to figure out different ways of examining the response of those communities to natural and anthropogenic disturbances (like hurricanes, bleaching, and oil spills). Anyway, I had been messing around with multivariate data analyses, and had started to explore if graph theory could be used to look at those types of biological questions. To cut a long story short, I realised that those same types of graph theory based analyses could be used to look at music communities and the world of music. From there, it was a matter of actually building an app that could do that effectively, which took some heavy duty coding skills on behalf of my amazing partners and access to some very large music datasets.
2. How does the app actually make suggestions? On the same lines, is it standard for everyone or does it learn about user preferences?
The music recommendations in the app are powered by the data that is constantly being developed by the incredible team over at the Echo Nest in Boston. They listen to music with machines, and mine the web for information about music with machines, and from that information they create these deep datasets that we then use in the app. Currently the app has some personalization features built in, as we work out some of your favorite music and display that in the app for you. In the future we’re looking at making the app learn your behaviour so that we can make the experience even better.
3. What are some goals for the end of 2011?
Ok. Right now we’re focused on maximising the growth of Discovr. We just released a new version (1.4) today which has a lot of performance and graphics updates. Beyond that we have a series of new apps in development, with the first of those coming out very soon. In terms of downloads and revenue we’ve been incredibly happy with the response we’ve had so far for Discovr. It’s a Number 1 iPad music app in 12 countries including Japan & Australia, and a Top 3 music app in 30 countries including the US & UK. Discovr has also been featured multiple times in the App Store across the globe including App of the Week, New & Noteworthy, App Store Essentials, What’s Hot, and even the Apps Starter Kit.
More importantly we’ve been contacted by a lot of people who bought the app because they wanted to say how much they enjoyed the app. One guy even told us that he’d bought 12 albums as a result of using Discovr. That is just fantastic news for users, for artists, and for the industry in general.
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