Billboard: @CES: Music Apps Abound

By Antony Bruno, Denver
Billboard

While most of the gearheads rubbing elbows at CES are there for the gadgets, plenty of service providers use the conference to announce their new applications – you know, the things that make all the shiny new toys interesting to use. Below are a few music-based apps that bubbled to the surface, so far.

– The Recording Academy was at CES showing off both a new iPhone app and a social media research widget. The Grammy iPhone app lets users predict winners in 21 different categories, Grammy and music industry trivia, photos of past Grammy moments and more. The social media app is called Fan Visualizer, a index of sorts that seeks to track the online buzz of any artist. Expected to be released Jan. 12, the Recording Academy is demonstrating the app Friday their suite in the Venetian.

– Former Virgin Records America CEO Matt Serletic’s new company Music Mastermind is using CES to evangelize a suite of mobile and social gaming products aimed to help anyone create music. The company is holding private meetings to show off the various applications, and has tapped digital consultant Ted Cohen to help spread the word. (Cohen slipped Music Mastermind into a Twitter post on top things at CES, which also included Intel, Panasonic, Samsung and Google.)

– UK music video service Muzu.tv unveiled a deal with Samsung to add music programming to the company’s line of Internet-connected TVs. There was a lot of focus on 3D TVs at the show, most of which also featured Internet access, so we should expect to see a lot more such content arrangements from Web-based service providers down the pike. Might be the thing that ramps up the production values for music videos again.

– Streaming music service Omnifone and Gracenote extended their relationship, adding the company’s music recognition and recommendation technology to the MusicStation app. Omnifone also released a set of APIs to let third party developers integrate MusicStation into their respective products and services.

Posted by Ted • Friday, January 8, 2010 .