We felt like celebrating some of our latest Cantora Labs projects, so we teamed up with smartwater and PureVolume to throw a 2 day mini festival of music + tech at this year’s CMJ 2011. The incredible team at Sonic Notify built an app for the event that pushed real-time interactive content to your phone throughout the multiple day experience (during and post event) via high frequency sound triggers. I’ll be writing a post with iPhone screen grabs and rundowns on how the app worked, and will share some incredible user engagement facts + data. 

In addition to our favorite bands and DJs, we collabed with some of the best music startups and technologies out there to create a never-before-seen, hands-on experience that incorporated technology directly into a live music event.

Spotify provided free premium accounts for attendees and worked with Sonic to push Smartlounge band-curated playlists to attendees during performances. When a band performed, all of their online audio, video, social info and other CMJ show dates were sent to your phone in realtime courtesy of plusmusic. In between band sets, attendees picked the music via our shared Spotify / Smartlounge collaborative playlist. We teamed up with Turntable.fm to allow attendees to DJ and vote on tracks within the smartlounge app during tt.fm IRL sets. Soundcloud + Gobbler recorded all the live band sets and are pushing hi quality live recordings of the sets to user’s smartphones via the Smartlounge app. EX.FM and 8Tracks showed off their latest products by providing tunes for attendees.

And SOL Republic hooked up 100s of free headphones that were awarded to attendees at random through badges that were delivered to their smartlounge apps when engaging with content at the event. I think I may have seen a couple people cry when they realized they won free headphones through their phone.

Keep eyes peeled for a slew of new surprises and experiences at the Cantora Labs Smartlounge at SXSW 2012…