Larry Marcus, from the VC firm Walden Venture Capital, has previously put money in music companies Pandora and Snocap. He came by recently to talk about his latest music investment, Melodis. Melodis makes a cool service called Midomi that recognizes music it hears (over speakers, or just when you hum it), so you can identify a song you want to know more about, or buy it. (See also: Shazam.)
The business model of Midomi is straightforward and attractive, especially now that there's an iPhone version of it. The free app can sell music tracks and generate revenues from affiliate fees. But Marcus wanted to tell me that there's untapped potential in both Midomi's technology and business model that he hopes to see the company exploit soon.
Midomi IDs songs for you.
(Credit: Screenshot by Rafe Needleman/CNET)The key to Midomi is Melodis' sound matching technology, called Sound2Sound. It's what lets a poorly-hummed rendition of a song get matched up to a recorded professional version of it (see my video review from 2007), but it's useful for more than just music identification. Midomi has created sound fingerprints not just of songs, but of titles and artists. So on the iPhone app, you can just speak the name of a song, and it will pull up a page where you can play a clip of it, watch a YouTube video of it, or buy it via the iTunes store.
The company has created another Sound2Sound app, the Melodis Dialer, a voice-dialing app for the iPhone. Marcus says it's better than the voice dialer on the iPhone 3GS. In a quick and unscientific test, I compared the Melodis Dialer on my iPhone 3G to the built-in voice dialer on a friend's 3GS. The Melodis Dialer was much more accurate, but slow. The 3GS' native voice dialer, in contrast, was very fast and had a voice synthesizer for feedback, but it got a lot of names wrong. Melodis also doesn't control other iPhone functions, like the music player. However, if you have an older 3G iPhone, it's a no-brainer app to install.
The Meldis Dialer is accurate but a little slow.
(Credit: Screenshot by Rafe Needleman/CNET)In the future, Marcus told me, the Melodis technology will be expanded to control the iPhone's music player, and possibly even as input for Pandora's iPhone app, so you could just hum a song you like to get a Pandora station that fits your mood.
The phoneme-matching Sound2Sound technology could possibly be used for other voice search products, although on the iPhone it may be hard to compete with the Google search app, which is spooky good.
The Midomi music app will be standard software on a few Windows Mobile phones from Samsung, which is a nice arrangement for all concerned: Melodis gets a licensing fee, and the mobile phone companies involved get revenues from selling music tracks.
Singing into an iPhone may garner some strange looks, but an application by Midomi encourages users to croon, hum, speak into their device. In return they will get the song title, name, and a link to buy the mp3 from iTunes. The service also works with SMS.
Singing and humming are just two of the ways to search for songs on the Midomi iPhone app.
(Credit: Midomi)With the new Midomi Mobile application (download), iPhone users can find an artist or song with voice or text search. The app also has the ability to "grab" a recording of a song to use for search. Users just have to hold their iPhone up to a speaker and submit the music clip.
Once song seekers find what they are looking for, they can buy the song or album from iTunes. Midomi will also link to related videos on YouTube or send the song to a friend.
The Midomi Web site has offered the online service to users since early 2007. The original software received a positive review from Webware.com, and made it to the finals of the 2008 Webware 100 contest.
The company says it has a one-of-a-kind platform because it offers many music search formats. It also says singers can be off key or mispronounce lyrics and the search engine will still get it right.
The Midomi Mobile app is free and available in the new iTunes 7.7 App store (download for Mac or Windows) that was released on Thursday.
In December, I covered Nayio's Humming Search, which is supposed to identify songs when you hum into your computer's microphone. It was a colossal letdown. But a few days ago I tried a new song identifier, Midomi [see News.com story], and it worked great. I tried several songs (including the acid test, "Yellow Submarine," that Nayio flunked), and Midomi named most of them just fine. It didn't hit 100 percent accuracy--during my video shoot, it misidentified Oasis's "Wonderwall" on one try out of about seven--but it's accurate enough to be usable. As long as your voice isn't completely shot, as Michael Arrington's must be.
Also cool: Users can sing their own renditions of songs into the system, and it can play them for you when it identifies songs. It's surprisingly entertaining to hear good amateurs covering a tune you've just hummed. And you can buy tracks off the site.
Technical bonus: Midomi uses Flash, which makes it simple. Nayio requires an ActiveX download and didn't work for me in Firefox.
The wow factor is high on this one. It's really cool and potentially useful.
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