How Social Media Can Create The Soundtrack Of Your City

Diana Figueroa for Shifted News

Markus Schwarzer is the founder of Groovecat, a social media app that enables users to capture and share their best ‘Music Moments’ - the feeling evoked when music fits perfectly within one’s social and physical environment. At the discussion 'Music, Data and the City: Towards Smart Music Cities' he is joined by urban and technology developers to discuss how music cities can become efficient, more livable and smarter.

In what ways do you see music and cities being connected?

If you look at music cities like Mannheim, it has quite a particular music scene, it’s very drum and bass-y. And then you have other cities, like Stuttgart, which is a big hip hop city. Hamburg is famous for their indie and also their hip hop music. Berlin obviously for the techno, so I think [music] does have quite a big influence on the identity and how the city perceives itself.

Take us through your app, Groovecat, and its inception. What prompted your desire to incorporate music, photo, and cities?

We created an app where you can capture music moments, so this feeling you get when music fits perfectly to the moment. You have this feeling of, ‘wow, this is the soundtrack of my life.’ You see yourself as being in a film. What we’re trying to make available to the user is this combination of a situation with music and the emotion it evokes. So this is a thing that no one really does in social media, but it says so much. It’s so crazy to see how our users, how they use the app and what an effect it has. Rather than looking at Snapchat or Instagram Stories and seeing ‘what am I doing right now,’ with Groovecat you can ask, ‘what am I feeling when I do it?’

How do you incorporate the song to the visuals that users upload?

You don’t choose the photo [yourself]. It kind of naturally happens. You have one of these activating moments and then you draw out your smartphone and capture it. It’s more natural with a song you wouldn’t know. What had also really startled us is the idea of negative emotions on social media: In our opinion, it is okay to post negative emotions on social media, and when we saw this actually happening with our app, it really blew us away. This is the thing, music encourages people to be way more honest about how they feel.

In what ways do you see technology and urban developers working with creatives, like yourself, to develop smart music cities?

There are millions of these cases where you can apply IT and how developers come together with creatives. I’ve seen this recently, where they encourage people to take the stairs rather than the escalator and they made it a pretty smart move: they enhanced the experience of using stairs. What it comes down to is how you can merge the experiences of music with a city and enhance infrastructure by steering people through music or creative experiences instead.

Is Berlin a smart music city already? If not, how can it be?

I wouldn’t say that it’s a smart city. With Berlin, everything is going the same way it went 50 years ago, in terms of when you see music events, you know, no one really went out there to enhance music experiences in any way and also when you look at ticketing, it’s just the 1-on-1 conversion from analog to digital. Of course, there are a couple of startups that are trying to do that: enhance the experiences before the event, but I don’t know if they’re succeeding or getting enough attention from the general public. Berlin can do more to lift these startups up and make people use them because the experience is way better.

What can we expect from your panel at re:publica?

The panelists come from urban development and I come from the music and data perspective, so I think we could meet in the middle. I think the biggest topic will be infrastructure and mobility. It’s always about how a city works. If you look at the index of the most livable cities, there are some uncontrollable factors like weather and natural disasters obviously, but the biggest factor you can control is infrastructure, where Berlin is always ranked pretty high. But it’s like, how can we increase this? And I think this will be a big topic. Infrastructure in musical events, like Lollapalooza in Berlin, the chaos of public transportation and steering masses through the intelligent use of infrastructure.

And from the audience?

People will come to the panel to get to know what’s possible because we don’t see that much being applied in reality, so to grasp on possibilities and maybe if they’re clever enough, they can do it themselves in the cities they’re coming from. Also, if you think music cities, Mannheim is a UNESCO city of music and they’re not shy of spreading that, which is good, because if UNESCO says this city is really important for music - and I think these labels are also quite attractive for cities - I see cities that aren’t music cities now can be in the future.