Jingle Player Brings Indy Music to the iPad

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Ever wonder how they come up with those great songs you hear in TV, film, advertising and interactive media? You know, those songs that sound like they might be huge hits but are actually songs you’re probably hearing for the very first time?

Odds are — in recent years, at any rate — producers of that TV show, film or ad got the music from Jingle Punks, a New York-based firm with a proprietary search algorithm and a huge (and growing) library of independent music that is changing the way music makes it into consumer media almost overnight.

Time was, creative directors in the entertainment industry sat in offices behind mountains of cassette tapes and CD jewel boxes, sifting through demos sent in by every Indy band from Bellingham to Boca Raton, searching for the right sound to make their productions sing. Often it amounted to drudgery as a job and a crap-shoot for musicians and songwriters, who never knew if their masterpiece would get played for the right set of ears.

Now, thanks to Jingle Player, an iPad app with advanced meta-tagging magic built inside, former drones for the likes of NBC, MTV, VHI and countless ad agencies on Madison Avenue are suddenly freed from their dank hovels to roam the earth brandishing iPads, fulfilling the dreams of indy musicians toiling in obscurity. The Jingle Player’s secret sauce lies in its ability to serve up the right songs based on the way people actually talk about music, using pop culture-relevant terms instead of technical music business jargon.

The Jingle Player app is free and anyone can create an account at the Jingle Punks website to license music for everything from single play personal use to projects bound for Sundance, HBO and beyond. Jingle Punks takes a healthy cut of the sync fees and performance royalties in return for the value add the company’s technology brings to both the production and artist sides of the transaction, but that’s to be expected for something as transformative and disruptive as this company and its product appear to be.

Jared Gutstadt, Jingle Punks founder and CEO said his company currently receives over 1,000 music submissions per month from independent artists and the client list now includes just about every major entertainment production company in business today. And they settled on Apple and the iPad, with one eye out for developing apps to run on other mobile platforms such as Android or Blackberry (especially since those companies, too, are following the Apple lead into tablet world), because everyone in-house is a Mac nut and because an iOS app was such a pleasure to develop.

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