Port company launches music app

Jessica Chin
Members of the Rednote team; Top, from left: Greg Cignarella (content editor), Kendall Berman (artist relations), Egipcia Mercado (head of content), Andy Blacker (CEO) and Nolan Leung (head engineer) Middle: Laila Kramer, Maddie Tashlik and Corey Levy (High School Interns from Schreiber High School) Bottom: Braden Blacker, Blaize Torio and Charlie Cohn (Beta Testers) Not Pictured: Kyra Alper (intern), Jess Girillo (intern), Brian Vo (head of product) (Photo courtesy of Kendall Berman)

By Jessica Chin

A small Port Washington startup launched a new phone app last week that it hopes will be the next social media leader in music text messaging.

The company, called Rednote, is located on Main Street in Port Washington and was established about 14 months ago. The app allows users “to integrate their favorite song clips and music lyrics into their text messages and onto their personal photos,” Kendall Berman, the marketing and artist relations manager, said.

Rednote is a combination of the three biggest behaviors online, Andy Blacker, the Rednote CEO and a Port Washington resident, said. The three are listening to music, uploading and sharing photos and searching for music lyrics, Blacker said.

“One hundred twenty million people in the U.S. search for music lyrics every month and eight billion photos are shared a day, and we combined them for free in one app that people can use to express themselves,” Blacker said.

The inspiration for the app is the “massive growth in messaging space, with three billion people on smartphones,” Blacker said. He said he realized that although people were sharing a lot of content such as photos and GIFs there was no clear way to share music that was “licensed.”

“The idea that people cannot share song clips, music lyrics, in their text messages, that’s a big opportunity right there,” Blacker said.

Although Rednote hopes to become the “standardization of music in text messaging,” the company wants “to continue to do service for the Long Island community,” Blacker said.

Rednote hires locally. It currently employs several paid high school interns, some from Manhasset Secondary School and Paul D. Schreiber High School in Port Washington.

The company is also in the process of creating a $1,000 to $2,000 technical scholarship at one or both of the high schools, Blacker said.

“We want to allow and provide a place where young people can help build a startup,” Blacker said. “We have the interns working across different divisions: content, editorial, marketing, social; each get to try their hands at the business and rotate through.”

The app is currently only available on Apple IOS. The app is expected to be on Android by 2018.

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