We are confident that one day a personal digital DJ will follow us and select the perfect song for every moment, scoring a soundtrack for our lives. Here are our twelve ideas for how this future could unfold:
1. Already, there are apps that match your music to how fast you are moving by comparing your steps per minute with the piece's beats per minute. What if we also added your intended destination? The app would give you something brisk during your morning walk to work, and something relaxing on the way back.
2. Have music recognize and match your location. A stroll through Boston Common would be accompanied by I'm Like A Bird. You’d be served the soundtrack from The Departed as you tour the city’s grittier neighborhoods.
3. A reading app could queue up music based on the book you are reading on your iPad by executing a semantic match of the music library to the story’s plot as you advance through the book. This could work well for graphic novels.
4. If you open an ad while reading a magazine on your iPad, the magazine could serve you a custom track that matches a set of criteria defined by the advertiser to create a specific "brand mood", similarly to how Pandora builds its custom stations.
5. Use current or cumulative music listening habits to generate random encounters and conversation starters in an application connected to a dating site.
6. Hey, baby, let’s go to Vegas! Book a trip to LA and have your online travel agent treat you with a playlist with “California Dreamin’,” “Hotel California,” and “Californication” for the flight.
7. How about an app that could auto-compose a playlist based on the music preferences of everyone who RSVPed to a Facebook event? It could be a selection of “most listened” tracks, or a selection of common tracks that all group members have listened to.
8. Taking that idea further, how about an app that adjusts music in the room based on how enthusiastically people are dancing? Or, in a retail setting, how fast people are moving through the store?
9. Allow locations on Foursquare to suggest songs to you when you check in. Your favorite coffee shop could let you take the cafe experience with you by sharing its favorite tracks to your iPhone if you’re ordering your latte to go.
10. We would love an app that understands what we are doing on our computers and plays music to match our activity: something mellow when we check our email, something serious when we write blog posts. And the sad trombone when we lose that file we’ve been working on all night.
11. Place online identity and sharing on the top of a music platform and you get the following scenario. You like an ad you saw on TV, you look it up on YouTube, you share it on Facebook. If advertisers conclude that it's the music that you really like about the ad, the track would be added to your playlist on a streaming service for a subtle brand connection.
12. Finally, we can imagine an app that takes in the ambient noise and voices around us and mixes them into a custom music piece, turning sound pollution into art.
