TuneUp Media, publisher of a powerful iTunes plug-in called TuneUp, announced Thursday that previous investor IDG Ventures has tacked on $2 million to the startup’s Series C funding from September 2010, bringing the total for the round to $6.3 million. To date, TuneUp has raised $8.5 million.Acknowledging that most iTunes users don’t have the time or determination to spend hours and hours painstakingly listening to, organizing and tagging their massive music collections, TuneUp steps in to do all the work for the user.
In essence, the plug-in claims to turn this…
…into this:
TuneUp combs through your collection and fixes the metadata for even the worst-tagged files; all those “Track 03” songs and “Unknown” artists actually get real names. If you’ve ever used Shazam on your mobile phone, you know tagging music this way actually works: TuneUp literally “listens” to the song to identify it and then imports the information. To do this, the company licenses technology from Gracenote, a media solutions service, which references a database of over 90 million indexed tracks. TuneUp also fills in missing album artwork.
On top of all that, TuneUp can be setup to send you concert alerts based on the artists in your library. It also provides access to more music discovery tools like videos and other content related to the music you like.
Since its 2008 launch, the service has attracted three million registered users internationally and has “automagically cleaned more than 1.5 billion mislabeled music tracks.”
Along with the funding news, TuneUp also announced that it has hired Greg Nuyens as CTO and Tim Mitchell as VP of Product Management.
The new funding will go toward developing “a suite of new products,” bolstering the team (as they’ve already done today) and spend more on marketing. What exactly that new suite of products could be is anyone’s guess at this point. I’ve reached out to TuneUp to try to glean more information, but so far have not yet heard reply.
Our best bet is it has something to do with music, but what? Post a comment on what you think TuneUp should develop next to enhance your music listening experience.
