Soundwave Powers Music With Big Data

Some say the music industry is in trouble, and has been for years, but Dublin startup Soundwave aims to provide a surprisingly holistic lifeline.  Their music discovery app has gained major attention from both Apple and Google, earning featured placement on each one’s app store.  The app functions by aggregating playback data from a number of mobile music applications: the native Music app, Spotify, Rdio, and others, and linking it to geospatial data and a social backbone.  The app is only part of Soundwave’s purpose, however, as it has proposed selling the playback and social data to the music industry to assist with business and marketing operations.  Could next summer’s smash hits be powered by big data?