A brand new enterprise based by music, gaming, and wellness consultants is launching a digital actuality app designed to harness the therapeutic advantages of singing.
To make this occur, Understand Music, Inc. has struck strategic agreements with Common Music Group (UMG) and Warner Music Group (WMG) that can deliver 1 million tracks to the Understand Music: Sing app, with new tracks touchdown weekly. The corporate says extra music offers are on the way in which.
Understand Music: Sing will launch in North America on January 23, 2025, on Meta Platforms’ Meta Quest VR headset. Understand Music says it’s growing variations of the app for Apple, Samsung, and Sony PSVR2 units, in addition to variations for cell units, PC and Mac computer systems, good TVs, and different media.
The app will launch with an introductory low cost subscription value of $9.99 per 30 days, or $99.99 per yr.
The Understand Music: Sing app will deliver individuals “right into a deeper relationship with their favourite music and artists… by creating immersive audio-visual journeys whereas using vocalization geared toward offering therapeutic advantages,” Understand Music mentioned.
The intention is to cut back stress, promote leisure, and launch endorphins, which helps relieve ache and enhance temper.
“Harnessing the ability of music to foster well being and wellness is a pure match for us.”
Bryan Stone, Common Music Group
“UMG has an extended and profitable observe document of partnering with modern new platforms in crucial areas with thrilling potential, like well being and wellness,” mentioned Bryan Stone, UMG’s Senior Vice President, Enterprise Improvement.
Stone added that “harnessing the ability of music to foster well being and wellness is a pure match for us. We hope that the Understand VR expertise will enhance individuals’s lives, providing a novel new aural expertise to advertise self-care whereas singing together with our artists.”
“We imagine that music has at all times been a bridge for self-expression, and this partnership with Understand Music amplifies that connection by offering an modern expertise that blends leisure with self-care,” mentioned Allan Coye, EVP, International Head of Recorded Music Enterprise Improvement, WMG.
“Collectively, we’re reshaping how followers expertise music – turning it into a strong instrument for leisure and private expression – whereas creating distinctive alternatives for our artists to succeed in their followers in thrilling new methods.”
“Collectively, we’re reshaping how followers expertise music – turning it into a strong instrument for leisure and private expression – whereas creating distinctive alternatives for our artists to succeed in their followers in thrilling new methods.”
Allan Coye, Warner Music Group
On prime of an intensive library that includes music “to go well with each musical style and temper,” Understand Music: Sing’s options will embrace “voice-reactive environments” through which visuals reply to a person’s singing, “lyric visualization” with lyrics reworking into “capitivating visuals,” and interactive actions equivalent to 3D portray and air drumming.
Customers may also be capable to create and share playlists.
“Worry of judgment retains greater than 80% of individuals from ever having fun with one of many oldest human traditions, and that’s an actual disgrace,” Understand Music co-founder Mike Wilson mentioned.
“Singing has maybe essentially the most well-documented physiological and psychological advantages within the burgeoning new science of music for wellness, and we’re right here to ask individuals to a private, personal, targeted expertise that can persistently produce joyous outcomes.”
“Singing has maybe essentially the most well-documented physiological and psychological advantages within the burgeoning new science of music for wellness.”
Mike Wilson, Understand Music
Wilson is a outstanding gaming producer and writer, identified for such seminal video video games as DOOM and Fall Guys.
Becoming a member of him as CEO is music and wellness business skilled Mark Roemer, who Understand Music says has spent greater than 20 years “on the intersection of gaming, tech, advertising and marketing, distribution, wellness, and content material creation.”
The Understand Music group additionally contains veterans of Sony, Meta, Rockstar Video games, and the Guitar Hero franchise, amongst others.
“Singing for our personal pleasure is a follow that the overwhelming majority of us in Western cultures have misplaced, as singing has grow to be performative and for proficient professionals solely.”
Mark Roemer, Understand Music
“Singing for our personal pleasure is a follow that the overwhelming majority of us in Western cultures have misplaced, as singing has grow to be performative and for proficient professionals solely,” Roemer mentioned in an announcement.
“We’re right here to alter that, inviting the armies of bathe singers of the world to get pleasure from essentially the most exhilarating private music expertise ever imagined.”
Neither UMG nor Warner are new to the wellness music recreation, with each firms partnering with numerous firms and investing thousands and thousands into exploring new wellness-related music purposes.
In 2022, UMG partnered with music wellness tech firm Music Well being on an app referred to as Vera, which is supposed to assist dementia sufferers via music.
In 2023, UMG struck a partnership with Arianna Huffington’s Thrive International to create Sollos, a music-centric wellness app. That yr, UMG additionally partnered with generative AI startup Endel to create “AI-powered, artist-driven practical music” for sleep, operating, leisure, and different functions.
This yr, MBW unearthed a patent from Common for a way to generate binaural beats and add them to current music. These beats can be utilized to generate numerous psychological states.
Most not too long ago, earlier this week, UMG introduced it had partnered with Cardiff-based Rescape Innovation to discover a brand new digital actuality therapy for nervousness that comes with customized music.
Warner Music has additionally invested within the wellness house. In 2022, it joined a $14 million funding spherical for LifeScore, a music tech firm targeted on sleep, well being, and wellness, amongst different issues. LifeScore launched its personal music label in 2023.
WMG additionally partnered with British well being tech startup MediMusic in 2023 to discover the potential of music as a therapeutic instrument. And its label Spinnin’ Information signed a deal with Endel in 2023 to create 50 AI-generated wellness music albums.Music Enterprise Worldwide
