Moodagent is a music streaming service that specializes in interactive playlists and personalized music recommendations. The Moodagent brand is developed and owned by the Danish company Moodagent A/S, which has proprietary methods for recognizing emotional and musical characteristics of individual tracks. The patented technology behind Moodagent combines digital signal processing, machine learning, AI techniques, audio analysis and human musicology. Using this technology, Moodagent analyzes key characteristics in songs such as mood, emotion, genre, style, instrument, vocal, orchestration, production, and beat/tempo.
History
Early development
Entrepreneurs and music enthusiasts Peter Berg Steffensen & Mikael A. Henderson founded Moodagent in 2001 to create an intelligent system that reads the inherent musical and emotional characteristics of each individual track, and to string them together in playlists that matches the style, tempo and current mood of the listener. An international patent was granted for an automated sequential logic mechanism in 2004, which would form the basis of the Moodagent playlisting technology developed in the following years.
First app release
The earliest incarnation of the Moodagent music mobile app was named Playlist DJ, developed specifically for Nokia phones and unveiled at Nokia World 2009. With the release of a version for Apple'siOS in December 2009, the app was completely redesigned and renamed Moodagent. New versions of Moodagent soon followed for other platforms: Android,, Symbian, Winamp, Intel AppUp, BlackBerry, WebOS, Spotify, Windows Phone, Nokia Asha. When Moodagent announced the discontinuation of all of their B2C offerings in December 2014, the Moodagent apps had been installed on more than 15 million mobile devices in 175 countries. The Moodagent music recommendation service preloaded with Winamp was downloaded more than 80 million times.
An official company press release was published in August 2019, announcing that the company was releasing a full premium music streaming service on September 19, 2019.
Platforms
The Moodagent music streaming service is available as an app on iOS smartphones and iPods and Android smartphones.
Features
Within Moodagent’s app, users can create and share playlists and moodagents, the company’s namesake feature. Moodagents serve as an in-app music curator that generates interactive playlists. Moodagents can be created and initiated by using any of the app’s “mood sliders” which include happy, angry, sensual, tender and tempo. The sliders can be adjusted at any time, pulling in new music with every adjustment.
Business Model
The Moodagent music streaming service operates under a premium subscription model.
Pricing
As of October 2019, Moodagent offers a premium-only subscription model for 99,00 DKR per month.
Geographic Availability
Following the September 2019 launch the Moodagent music streaming service was released exclusively in Denmark, but the company has opened an office in India and established subsidiaries in Germany, Poland and Australia, with plans to enter 17 markets.
Clients and Partnerships
From 2009 to 2014 Moodagent provided consumer faced products, including mobile apps for music playlists & recommendations. Moodagent was also included as an online music recommendation service in Winamp and among the first apps chosen for inclusion on Spotify's app platform. In 2014, Moodagent began focusing on delivering music data services on a B2B basis. Products included music metadata, tools for music recommendations, auto-generation of playlists & audio similarity search for clients including Sony Music, Universal Music Publishing Group, Mood Media, 7digital & TouchTunes. Several other partnerships were announced, including deliveries for Mood Media's Mood Mix service and The Electric Jukebox Company. In September 2016 Moodagent announced a joint partnership with Unruly, Affectiva and Kent State University to bring end-to-end emotional intelligence to digital advertising. A partnership with the Danish Music Awards was announced in September 2019.
