TastemakerX Introduces Collections, Music Fantasy Leagues, New Personal Listening Experience

SAN FRANCISCO, CA--(Marketwire - Mar 7, 2013) - TastemakerX, the leading social game for music discovery, today introduced a new user experience that spotlights members' music tastes evolving toward a new 'Collections' motif, and delivers a powerful new listening experience powered by Spotify, Songkick, SoundCloud and YouTube. The platform enables fan-powered music discovery via the first Fantasy Leagues platform for music, which is available for private leagues and as a white-labeled platform for partners. The new TastemakerX experience is available immediately; and TastemakerX will host a special showcase at SXSW in Austin, Texas at Speakeasy on March 11, from 9pm - 2am, featuring Lord Huron, The Joy Formidable, St. Lucia and others.

TastemakerX also announced that it has taken on an additional $1.25M in funding from Baseline, True, Guggenheim, and AOL. The new funding will be used to continue to evolve social music discovery via platform innovation and partnerships.

"With exponentially more music being made today than 30 years ago, music discovery has gotten considerably more difficult despite technology's great advances," said Marc Ruxin, founder and CEO, TastemakerX. "Games inspire people to search harder and accumulate more knowledge, and therefore force discovery in new ways. By enhancing the discovery elements of TastemakerX, along with the playback experience, we're coming out of Beta with a product our users can really dig into and expand their music enjoyment."

The TastemakerX platform evolution includes the following features:

• Fan-powered music discovery: Algorithms are efficient, but finding new music based on what your community loves is targeted, and fun. TastemakerX has been rebuilt to empower users to dig into new music based on social recommendations.
• A brand new 'Collections' motif has replaced the pre-existing stock market metaphor: Let the world know you were a fan since before the beginning, and show off your musical and cultural depth!
• A new listening experience driven by tight integrations with Spotify, Songkick, SoundCloud and YouTube. Spotify playlists generated by your Collection allow you to stream directly via TastemakerX.

TastemakerX is also introducing, for the first time ever, Fantasy Leagues for Music.

"Fantasy sports have proven to be the only successful long-term gamification of anything, ever," said Ruxin. "People join leagues with friends and strangers, and invest tons of time into knowing everything about anyone in a given sport. The forcing function of having to 'make moves' and make trades keeps players sharp and active. TastemakerX is delivering a new experience to compel music fans to be similarly proactive about the music they listen to and the artists they keep up on, not just around the occasional new music itch to scratch. We see this as a game changer for discovery."

For more information and to start using TastemakerX today, please visit www.tastemakerx.com.

About TastemakerX
TastemakerX is a social gaming platform for music fans. The game encourages players to discover new artists, trends and inspiration; listen to playlists of their Collections via Spotify, Songkick, SoundCloud and YouTube; compete in Fantasy Leagues against other tastemakers; and share experiences through geo-tagging, commentary and photo sharing.

TastemakerX was founded in 2011 by Marc Ruxin and Sandro Pugliese and is headquartered in San Francisco, Calif. Investors include Guggenheim Partners, Baseline Ventures, True Ventures, AOL Ventures, Tekton Ventures. Angel investors and advisors include John Battelle, Marc Geiger, Andrew Anker, Mich Mathews, Michael Kassan, Ian Rogers, Paul Bricault, Ted Rheingold and Mike Lazerow.