New way to get tunes
By: Jessica Ricks, Staff Writer
Towson University was selected as one of the few campuses asked to sample a new way of listening to music. “Trebel Music” is a new interactive app bringing you unlimited free music, music videos and multiple social features.
The free Trebel Music app contains a database of all of your favorite songs and albums that you can download and play whenever you want.
Unlike some other music apps, Trebel is completely free. Instead of paying for music with real money the app uses points or virtual currency, which you earn when you download music and spend when you listen. It will be available for iOS, Android and in the future, for desktop use.
Trebel will first be released to colleges and universities in a couple of locations.
Phase one of the release will be to a select handful of campuses that will be the first to try the app, and Towson is one of them. Toward the end of the year, it will further be released to 3,000 colleges and universities in the U.S. and after that to 30,000 high schools.
As an incentive, when people download the app they’ll receive a free $20 coupon for the cab service, Lyft.
Gary Mekikian, founder and CEO of Trebel’s parents company M&M Media, and Corey Jones, product chief of M&M Media, created the app with a production team of young individuals.
“We’ve used a lot of young and cool colors and images and so on to make the app interactive and interesting for young people,” Mekikian said. “We like to say that treble is the music app for millennials.”
Trebel contains a variety of features. There are lists of top songs and albums, new releases, and genres.
When you download a song onto your device, you make virtual currency, which is used to listen to music and guarantees the artist whose music is being played gets compensated.
The download time is used to show you a video advertisement, which is how Trebel makes revenue, although music can be played ad-free by spending ten points of your currency per song.
“It sounds like a good opportunity to get new music,” freshman criminal justice major Matt Finn said.
Trebel also comes with a social feature. On the activity feed you can see what people are listening to around your campus as well as other campuses.
Users can also follow and search for people, get notifications when they discover a new artist and share and make playlists for your friends.
“It has to bring something that other music apps don’t have,” junior accounting major Joshua Ikotua said.
According to Mekikian the app stands out among its competition because it’s free, flexible for its targeted audience and has a social media aspect that other apps don’t have.
When music isn’t free and people don’t have money, often times they’ll turn to free download sites or YouTube converter sites where artists are not compensated for their work.
Additionally, the music quality may not be good and the websites may leave computers open to viruses. Trebel aims to combat this situation in which both the consumer and the artist lose.
“The reaction that we expect from people is ‘finally’,” Mekikian said. “People can get their music from a mobile app, and get it in a way that makes sure the artists are compensated. And people can listen to music they want without having to put out a lot of dollars that they don’t have.”