May
Sony ericsson is working on a very interesting project that would essentially allow your digital audio player to determine where you were located and then offer you up a list of downloadable tracks that have been tagged to that location.The idea is that certain music works well in certain locations, like I’d tag “Ain’t That A Kick In The Head” to all the gas stations in my neighborhood and “Livin’ on a Prayer” to my local bank branch.
The system has been detailed in a patent filed by Sony Ericsson (manufacturers of the excellent Walkman music phones) entitled “Location dependent music search”. The patent details how users would be able to tag tracks with the locations they associate the tracks with as well as downloading songs that are associated with their current location.
Sony has a reputation of producing some innovative music phones already but offering a service that allowed users arriving in a particular new city to download a soundtrack for that city would open up a whole new world of mobile music based social networking. The best analogy of this service is the geo-tagging being offered by photo sharing site flickr.
