Sonarflow: The End Of Content Overload On Spotify

(UPDATED) Easily one of the biggest problems facing music listeners today continues to be the issue of content overload. Services like iTunes, Spotify or Amazon offer up to 20 million titles, with models ranging from per track download, to flat-fee subscription and on-the-go streaming. Overwhelmed by choice, many people simply revert to listening to the same songs in their libraries over and over again. But Sonarflow, a newly launched Spotify app, aims to personalize the discovery of content with a visualized discovery experience.

Sonarflow attempts to solve the problem of content overload by delivering recommendations personalized to a user’s taste and listening preference, combined with a unique and zoomable visual user interface that makes it quick and engaging to access music. Users can zoom in and tap bubbles to play tracks, find information on artists and watch videos. Additionally, there is an icon that allows users to see similar artists in that genre – facilitating the discovery of new music.

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The app employs acoustic audio matching to deliver music recommendations based on rhythm, beat and timbre. The company believes that this provides a better-personalized experience than traditional collaborative filtering-based music recommendation engines that are “limited to the short tail of the music catalog and leaves out 97% of the available content.”

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Sonarflow claims to have invented an “intelligent hierarchical clustering method” that automatically groups the available content into categories such as genre or mood, and displays the content in manageable chunks as opposed to cluttering the screen with an endless array of content. The technology takes audio content, metadata, user preferences, and social relations into account and is the basis for the visual organization that Sonarflow offers.

Sonarflow for Spotify is a free app for Spotify Premium users and will soon be available for download in the App Store.

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