If you have a penchant for blasting out some tunes from your laptop whilst whipping up a tasty treat in the kitchen, you might like this neat little Web app.
FoodBeats is the handiwork of Outside Line, Lurpak’s social agency, which has teamed up with Last.fm to develop an online music tool that generates and streams recipe-based playlists based around what you’re cooking.
Launching today, FoodBeats taps Last.fm’s scrobbling technology to give users recommendations to fit with what they’re mustering up in the kitchen, and not only serves (pardon the pun) to help discover new music, but also takes the hassle out of deciding what to listen to by doing the donkey-work on your behalf.
Whilst you don’t have to be connected to Last.fm to use it, it will help with personalization if you hit the ‘Connect to Last.fm’ button. Then, you simply tell it what you’re cooking.
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Based on tags, Last.fm delivers songs relevant to whatever is being cooked. To feed into this (again, excuse the pun) Outside Line has also reeled in recipe network Foodily – a company we’ve covered before – to enhance the campaign’s credentials by suggesting recipes for complementary dishes, while also serving up tips.
For this I entered ‘jerk chicken’, and then told it I was expecting to be cooking for 60 minutes. I was then presented with an hour-long selection of tunes with a hint of the Caribbean around it, and a tip for how to best serve the dish:
If it doesn’t recognize the dish you enter (what…no haggis?), it will give you the chance to enter a general style of cuisine instead, for example British, Mexican or Italian:
“The inspiration for FoodBeats came about whilst discussing how contemporary foodies connect with their laptops in the kitchen environment to seek recipe inspiration, tips and advice, whilst listening to their favourite music,” explains Dan Rutherford, Outside Line’s Creative Strategy Director. “We were excited to act on this insight by developing a tool that links the food and music worlds in an innovative, useful way. Ultimately, FoodBeats provides new music and recipe inspiration in one place, further enhancing the modern kitchen environment.”
Founded in the UK in 2002, CBS-owned Last.fm is a global music discovery service which intelligently recommends new music and personalised radio and concerts. Last.fm harnesses 60 billion pieces of music taste information to recommend music to almost 40 million users across 12 languages in more than 200 countries.
“It’s brilliant to be able to bring music and food together so seamlessly with the launch of Foodbeats by Lurpak,” says Chris Wistow, Commercial Director, CBS Interactive Music Group, Last.fm. “Last.fm’s ability to tailor a bespoke radio station to the type of food being whipped up in the kitchen will give music and food fans the perfect soundtrack. This is also a great example of how Last.fm can enable a brand to deliver a fully integrated and very engaging music campaign.”
FoodBeats is also being heavily promoted through Lurpak’s own channels, including Facebook and Twitter.
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