If you mashed up Instagram with music tracks, what would you get? A timeline of pictures from friends with evocative soundtracks that stimulate the ears as well as the eyes? Perhaps even tug at the emotions? That, at least, is the hope of Tunepics, a new social network that does just that.
With this new iOS app, users can feature a song with every image they share. The tracks are pulled from the Apple store (35 million songs) and are in fact song previews rather than the whole tracks. If users decide they like the song enough to buy it form Apple, Tunepics will get affiliate revenues from those sales.
The app is the brainchild of Justin Cooke, founder of innovation agency innovate7 in London, and has been built by AKQA, the London interactive agency.
It’s Cooke’s hope that Tunepics will be a “magical and cinematic celebration of people’s lives that touches all of our senses .… With Tunepics, everyone can create a soundtrack to their life.” Indeed, using the app is akin to scrolling past auto-playing videos in Facebook, except these are pictures with music.
But this is a little more than the launch of an app. Some major celebrities and brands have signed up to use the app, including Airbnb, AllSaints, Asos, Dazed, Jamie Oliver, Kate Bosworth, Michael Polish, Paul Smith, Tracy Anderson, will.i.am and others.
On Tunepics you don’t like or retweet; instead, you attach an emotion to a tunepic using an ‘emotion wheel’ – selecting a colour to represent the impact of what you’ve seen, felt and heard.
You can add an array of filters to photos, including weather effects like sunshine, rain, snow, raindrops or a rainbow (DOUBLE RAINBOW!). Users can also ‘re-tune’ (share) a tunepic that they love back onto their own feed, alongside standard social functions such as ‘likes’ and comments.
All this data is captured so you can see how people are reacting to your content, showing how many people are, ‘dancing’, ‘inspired’ or ‘happy’ about a tunepic. Thus, Tunepics hopes to show what an entire country is feeling and listening to at any moment.
Of course, there is a sort of Trojan Horse inside this. Since Tunepics drives engagement around music, it may be able to send a song into the charts if enough people attach it to their pictures and then end up buying it.
Source By : TechCrunch