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The internet removed a sense of place from our lives by connecting people and content from everywhere, but location-aware smartphones are changing that by affixing tweets, pictures, business listings — and now songs — to specific real-world locations.

An exciting new iPhone app by Soundtrckr mashes maps and internet radio, letting listeners geo-tag stations and songs and listen to other users’ stations based on location. It’s a simple yet powerful concept, which allows you to see what your neighbors (or people anywhere) are listening to, tune in, leave comments and become friends.

So far, geo-tagging apps have focused on photos and tweets, and Soundtrckr is the only geo-tagging music app in the iTunes App Store. But it’s only a matter of time until its location-aware music features find their way into Pandora (currently the top free music app for iPhone) and other music-streaming mobile apps, because it gives users a useful new way to listen, discover new music and meet each other. For now, Soundtrckr is worth a free download by any music fan with an iPhone (iTunes link), because of its seamless overlay of songs, stations, and listeners on Google Maps.

“Music is a shared experience, a way to communicate and connect,” said Soundtrckr founder and CEO Daniele Calabrese on the company’s blog. “It’s intimately tied to the people and places in our daily lives, and soundtrckr is the first application that recognizes and facilitates this connection in a concrete way. [It] makes our cities and friends active participants in the way we experience music.”

Like other interactive radio services, Soundtrckr lets you create stations from a song or an artist — the only catch is that the song or artist has to be on your iPhone’s memory. The whole point of streaming music to your phone is that you don’t have to use up its storage with music files, so Soundtrckr really should include a way to add songs and artists that aren’t already on your phone — after all, an API from MediaNet (formerly MusicNet) already provides metadata and the songs themselves to the service. Also, there’s currently no way to shape stations with ratings and the service lacks an offline playback mode.

But those problems are readily solvable, and don’t detract significantly from the apps core strength: listening by location. Users can geo-tag the currently-playing song on any station so that others can listen to what they heard at that spot (30-second previews), leave comments about the song, or buy it from iTunes. As for station playback, there are no length limitations. You can listen to your own stations, your friends’ stations, or the stations of any user you find on the map, or browse by people, places or stations. The play/pause button and currently-song information follow you through every screen, which is a nice touch.

Soundtrckr suggested another user who’s into the band Atlas Sound, so I made friends with him and have been enjoying Greg K.’s station on my iPhone all morning. I checked out his geo-tags, and Greg K. gets around — he listened to Atlas Sound’s “Quick Canal” in Austin, Texas, Ulrich Schnauss’s “A Letter From Home” in San Francisco and Tobacco’s “Dirt Featuring Aesop Rock” in Rochester, NY. If I want, I can send him or my other friends messages and songs through the service. As I was listening to that station, the app alerted me that Soundtrckr founder Daniele C. was listening to the one I created out of The Fall song “C.R.E.E.P.” Suddenly, even though I was listening alone, I didn’t feel quite so alone.

Music fans aren’t the only ones who will like Soundtrckr; it could also give marketers a valuable way to track the genesis of a hits and popularity of genres by neighborhood and let them know where to put advertisements and flyers for an upcoming show. Labels and marketers access similar data from file sharing networks and legitimate services by IP address, but mobile phone geo-tagging offers far more precision.

Soundtrckr only launched on Friday, and its geo-tags and users are still relatively sparse. I found another listener in Manhattan this morning (screenshot above), but the Brooklyn listener who was online yesterday is gone, and I don’t see any others today. Once Soundtrckr gets a bit longer in the tooth and starts racking up more users and tags, its location browsing feature will improve. We imagine someone will eventually integrate this service or something like it into an augmented reality app, so you can see songs and stations as you look around your surroundings. Even now, it’s worth installing.

On-demand music streaming services without a video component are dying, but programmed and interactive webcasts survive — and threaten to thrive. Pandora, for one, whose registered users doubled to 40 million this year with 3 million active users per day, is profitable. It and other internet radio services are relatively doing well because they enjoy far lower per-song royalty rates than on-demand music services — they’re closer to a radio than an encyclopedic iPod, so they pay less. (The difference between the two types of service is why, when people say Spotify will compete with Pandora, they have no idea what they’re talking about.)

Adding location awareness to social music streaming, already a rare strong suit for music start-ups, will make them even more potent by giving listeners another efficient way to discover music — and each other. And this time around, it matters where you are.

Screenshot gallery:

See Also:

• 3-D Maps, Camera Phones Put ‘Reality’ in Augmented Reality
  
• Pandora Predicts First-Ever Profit
• Commercials Come to Pandora Internet Radio
• How to Geotag Your Photos
• MySpace Music Acquires Shuttered Imeem Music Service
• MySpace/Imeem Deal Leaves Thousands of Artists Unpaid
• Imeem: Store Music in the Cloud, Access It on the iPhone
  
• U.S. Exclusive: Hands-On with the Spotify iPhone App
• App Turns iPhone Into Dime Jukebox
• The Album Is Dead, Long Live the App

Original post by Eliot Van Buskirk