Mystery music app TastemakerX nails down a $1.8M funding round pre-launch

It hasn’t even launched yet, but TastemakerX has already sealed a reasonable deal to lock in funding from Silicon Valley investors.

Now that’s what we call rock n’ roll.

The social-mobile-music app raised a $1.8 million chunk of change for its first round of institutional funding. Investors include Baseline Ventures, AOL Ventures, True Ventures, and a slew of others, including a handful of angels.

The app is still shrouded in mystery; we haven’t seen screenshots or gotten a specific rundown of what it will do. But according to the company’s description, it’s a timely crossover between socially driven tech and new music discovery.

(Updated: We just got a screenshot; see below.)

“What music fan doesn’t want to be the first to discover the next big band and get credit for it?” said TastemakerX co-founder Marc Ruxin in a release this morning.

“Like fantasy sports for music lovers, players will be able to browse portfolios of like-minded music aficionados to discover new music and see real-time news about the artists they are exploring.”

“TastemakerX solves two problems,” said Baseline founder Steve Anderson in the same release. “It delineates personal taste and influence, establishing a true ‘taste graph,’ and it gamifies culture, in the same way fantasy sports leagues gamifiy professional sports for millions of fans.”

Based on all this “fantasy’ talk, we’re assuming we’ll see points systems and leaderboards for early trend identification. The app will also offer location-tagging and photo-sharing features.

And what better place to discover new bands than at South by Southwest next month in Austin — not so coincidentally the launch date and place selected for TastemakerX.

TastemakerX is based in San Francisco and was founded in August 2011.

Image courtesy of Olga Zaretskaya, Shutterstock