Since its release in 2008, TuneUp has been the most popular plugin for iTunes by helping people to clean up their music libraries; by organizing songs, deleting duplicates and replacing missing cover art. The company is one of the few digital music services with all of the necessary tools needed to be an industry leader: a much-needed service, exceptional leadership, funding and great marketing.
Founder Gabe Adiv who spent five years in sales and channel marketing at Gracenote is one of the few entrepreneurs that I have seen personally offering free trials to the readers of just about every blog that TuneUp is mentioned in. If you want some humor, you should check out TuneUp’s Youtube channel which has some of the funniest videos I’ve seen in a while, with Hip-Hop Legend Biz Markie starring as Captain TuneUp. Below is an interview I had the last week with TuneUp Media’s director of Marketing Attiya Abdulghany.
What inspired the creation on TuneUp Media?
Gabe Adiv, our Founder, had the idea back in 2007 mainly because he had a lot of frustrations that our present users have with their music libraries. He was going through his music collection one day, and noticed that his music was all over the place: duplicate songs, missing cover art, and untitled songs. So, he spent a while searching for a solution and he couldn’t find one that worked and was user-friendly. So TuneUp Media born.
How would explain TuneUp to someone who has never heard of it?
TuneUp is a great solution for people who have a lot of the problems that I described in your last question. We specifically solve the issues with untitled tracks, duplicate tracks and missing cover work which are prevelant in most digital music collections. We developed an intelligent solution that works on I-Tunes and Windows Media Player that helps you fix all those problems and find the music that you are looking for efficiently.
Can you explain the cleanup process for me?
TuneUp has four major features that I can briefly explain. The first one is clean, which uses a technology called acoustic fingerprinting to go into locally stored music file to listen and recognize the files. That technology is powered by Grace Note ID database which has about 90 million songs. So, the accuracy of clean on the average music library is 85% to 95%. The next feature, which is really simple to use is called cover art. There is a button that says find missing photos or cover art and this scans your entire music collection searching for albums with missing cover art, and it generates the correct artwork for the corresponding album. The third feature looks for duplicate tracks in your library by using acoustic fingerprinting or waveform recognition. The last feature, which has nothing to do with organizing and managing your music is called Tuniverse. Tuniverse, is a cool all in one music discovery feature that locates concerts, music recommendations, artist, news and music videos.
How much has TuneUp changed since launching in 2008?
A lot has changed but, the core product is still the same. We continue to build upon our four major components and our focus has always been making the cleanup process more efficient. Music Tech has changed a lot in the three years I have been with the company, but our business continues to do well because the disorganization within music libraries still exist, and as people are in the process of uploading their music into the “cloud,” our service is needed even more.
Will TuneUp remain I-Tunes focused or do you have plans to integrate into other music services?
We are always considering partnering with other services but we have found that integrating with a media player like I-Tunes or Windows Media Player provides overall better user experience, because people can actually see the service working.
What is the long-term vision for TuneUp?
Short term we have some pretty exciting stuff we’re working on. We will be releasing a mobile app pretty soon as well, but the market kind of dictates a lot of what we do. Our main objective has been to continue to make the digital music experience better for everyone.
