DEVELOPER’S BIOGRAPHY AND PODCAST SUMMARY
The music app ‘Soundwave’ was developed by Brendan O’ Driscoll, Aidan Sliney, and Craig Watson the respective ages 25, 28 and 29. This application was a part of the Launchpad program of the National Digital Research Centre and was successfully founded in the year 2012. The man in the podcast is Stephen Fry, who was a member of the group that tested the earliest version of this application. Steve Wozniak, who is the co-founder of Apple, was also a member of this testing group. It is the property of a Dublin-based company. It went live on iPhone in June 2013 (James).
The podcast summarizes the features and functionalities of the application and its market value. It is an Apple music app that allows its users to follow other people and have access to information regarding what music they are listening to at what time and at what locations. It also allows them to share and recommend different songs with their friends. It has been released for both Android and iPhone (Apple Podcasts Preview).
MICRO VIEW
It is not a music player application; rather, it sits above all the music apps and lets you monitor their activities. The developers of this application made sure to not to make it a standalone application like twitter because twitter seems to be facing quite a difficult time due to this. It gives you a sneak peek into what your friends are listening to and lets you get a taste of that music within the app. However, it also gives you access to SoundCloud and YouTube to play the whole tracks. It lets you see the time and the locations of the people who are playing the music and also, the number of times they have it on repeat. One drawback of it is that when someone you follow keeps playing the same track again and again, then it will dominate your feed (Stuart).
The thing that is of interest here is that how Apple allowed such an application to be published on their play store allows you to see what others are doing on their phones as Apple has always been concerned about the privacy of its users. However, the app performs this task smartly, and it has such an immense market value that they could not afford to miss this app.
MACRO VIEW
This application, I believe, has a very great value in the music market. Right now, it might be only just for the application users and normal people, but it has the potential to do a lot more for the music industry itself. The music experts who analyze what kinds of tracks are on-demand at this point in time does so by looking at the no. of purchases of the track. However, this does not give them access to the actual number as a lot of people use pirated websites to download these tracks. And also, they can only get information related to the number of purchases of the songs and not the data about how many times it is being played and being listened to at what time by what people. This application has the ability to perform this task for music experts. The music industry can know what kind of music is in popular demand at what location and create and compose the tracks accordingly. It will obviously help them bring out more and more successful songs. Thus, this application has quite a bigger market than what its original features were made for, and it can prove to be a huge step for the music industry towards growth.
Work Cited
Apple Podcasts Preview. “Soundwave with Stephen Fry: Meet the Developer: Soundwave with Stephen Fry: Meet the Developer.” Podcasts. 2013. Web. 5 July 2019. https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/soundwave-with-stephen-fry-meet-the-developer/id669197068?i=1000162106837.
James, Martin. “Irish music app Soundwave launched by Stephen Fry.” Irishpost. 1 July 2013. Web. 5 June 2019. https://www.irishpost.com/business/irish-music-app-stephen-fry-8030.
Stuart, Dredge. “Soundwave hopes to shake up music discovery on iPhone and Android.” The Gurdian. 20 June 2013. Web. 5 June 2019. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/appsblog/
2013/jun/20/soundwave-music-app-iphone-android.
