Montreal-based TuneStars has launched a free app via the iTunes store that aggregates and organizes music-related content pulled from top online sources into one central location, making it a nexus for fans, bands and record company talent scouts.
The app pulls in posts by artists from various sources that include Facebook, Instagram, SoundCloud, Twitter and YouTube, in effect expanding on the TweetDeck concept by drawing in data from multiple social media platforms.
The obvious benefit for the fans is that they can follow various artists using one app. For the acts, the aggregator makes it easier to notify fans of marketing campaigns, merchandising promotions, tour announcements and ticket discounts.
The app's youthful founder, Anthony Shannon, said he was motivated to create TuneStars when he realized there was an opportunity for a product that aggregated social media and the commercial aspirations of musicians. "MySpace was the first music aggregator to empower artists in order to facilitate their own success. But social wasn’t yet fully there. And if it was, it wasn’t integrated. Keeping social and music separate just seems crazy today. It honestly makes no sense in my opinion not to combine the two. But there’s an important recent third trend – the fact that content, especially music, has become increasingly hard to consume due to ever more segmentation/fragmentation and the sheer volume of it all. So I set out to find a creative way to streamline and socialize music," Shannon said in a recent interview.
Expanding on the theme: ''We see the artist landscape in 3 different tiers: the superstars, established artists, and up and coming artists. For tier 2 and 3 artists, it's not uncommon to see the top 10% of their fans account for 30% of their revenues, and for the superstar artists, their top 10% of fans accounting for over 80% of total revenues."
Shannon figures the music industry is a multi-billion dollar industry run mostly by 'superfans'. "Since this is the truth of the industry today, we see lots of artists coming up with fan clubs, special apps, special experiences and promotions for sale targeted to the super fans. We see our platform not only appealing to the super fans, who drive most the revenue, as they don't want to miss anything going on with their bands, but also a good avenue for the laid back person who just wants that one central easy place to keep up with all that's going on music wise in the world.''
Shannon launched the company in 2013 and has raised over half a million dollars in investment capital to date. An IDEABOOST Portfolio Company (2015), TS has just recently completed a private beta and launched its app in Canada on Oct. 3rd.
According to the iTunes store description, the app is available in 17 languages other than English.