Huawei Licenses NQ Mobile Music Radar

NQ Mobile has announced that Huawei is licensing its NQ Mobile Music Radar audio search and music discovery tool.

"The rapid growth and market interest in Music Radar is a testament to our belief that applications and services for entertainment search and discovery are increasingly important as our smartphones evolve into portable entertainment devices," stated co-Founder and co-CEO of NQ Mobile, Henry Lin. "Music Radar is just one example of what we can do with the underlying audio recognition technology, and NQ is well positioned to build on its success to meet the rapidly changing technology needs globally while becoming more useful and integrated with our partners and end consumers."

The service will be integrated into Huawei’s ring back tone (RBT) and other applications. Music Radar works by recognizing songs that are played or hummed or sung into the phone. A similar app is Shazam, which tries to match songs based on audio recognition over smartphones. Music Radar is available for both iOS and Android devices. The company said that it fielded more than 6 million searches per day.

The deal follows others that NQ Mobile has made with major providers in China including  China Mobile, TTPod and Kugou. Music Radar is already integrated into the media players that these companies offer.

Music recommendation apps are becoming big business as the music industry transitions to digital formats as CD sales continue to slide in favor of downloads and streaming formats.

Spotify recently acquired The Echo Nest, a music intelligence services company, to deliver better recommendations to its streaming customers. The economics of streaming music favor matching music tailored to a customer’s tastes rather than aiming artists for mass appeal. Matching music to customers will encourage them to listen to their favorite songs over and over and keep them subscribing to streaming services.