Children love to play, and where better than in a controlled online environment where they can frolick with other children and create music? ToonsTunes, launching today at the #TC50 is making a play in exactly that space. The system involves a series of activities that reap “impressive rewards” for you avatar. Of course, just pimping an avatar is hardly enough to keep the attention of a child, so the game also emphasizes social music sharing.
Never too early to get into Twitter, right? And, as a personal musicphile, I am very excited about the concept behind this.
ToonsTunes claims that children still like music, that might be true, but if Kanye keeps running the scene, I am scared. ToonsTunes is a virtual world where you can immerse yourself in a variety of musical styles, venues, and recording studios to create and promote your own music. The music creation tool is called the “mix-o-matic,” where you add in genres, tempos, keys, and use other simplified mechanisms of composition. Once your song is all wrapped up, you can take it to a “club” in the game to show off your music.
You work with different loops, akin to the ever present FLStudio that has so taken over modern music. There are a pile of loops to work with, and are placed together inside of similar keys and tempos to create music that sounds surprisingly good. The founder is singing on stage – that is ballsy.
The only worry that I have (other than their business model) is whether they can create enough loops and input pieces to in fact keep kids excited. They have been working with normal artists to get the applications music set up and ready for launch.
The company has three models: freemium, merchandising, and another part that we did not catch. They plan to promote the product through “viral” methods, which means hope that Twitter works.
