Kern El­liott loved mu­sic but his pas­sion and ca­reer choice was in­for­ma­tion tech­nol­o­gy, so it was no sur­prise to his peers when he de­vel­oped a mu­sic ap­pli­ca­tion in his bid to help up-and-com­ing lo­cal artistes get the recog­ni­tion they craved for.

El­liott's idea for the mu­sic app, Chune, a word in T&T di­alect which re­placed the stan­dard Eng­lish word tune, orig­i­nat­ed from an every­day ob­ser­va­tion as some of his friends at the time were strug­gling for ra­dio time on the lo­cal air­waves and recog­ni­tion.

Cap­i­tal­is­ing on his qual­i­fi­ca­tions in both in­for­ma­tion sys­tems de­sign and man­age­ment, El­liott said Chune was cre­at­ed to pro­vide "a plat­form where peo­ple can go to hear mu­sic based on their own lik­ing and not based on what peo­ple think we should hear".

With the tagline: "Mo­bil­is­ing the mu­si­cal un­der­ground," Chune utilis­es mo­bile tech­nol­o­gy to aid lo­cal artistes in at­tain­ing in­creased ex­po­sure by putting their new mu­sic in the hands of the lis­ten­er.

Thus far Chune has been de­scribed by some as the "lo­cal iTunes" which in­deed is quite a feat to ac­com­plish.

The ap­pli­ca­tion ac­cord­ing to El­liott can be down­loaded on both An­droid and iPhone and is very user-friend­ly and al­lows users to lis­ten, search, rate and even com­ment on new and up­com­ing Caribbean artistes.

For artistes, Chune gives them the op­por­tu­ni­ty to cre­ate their own pro­files on the app plat­form, giv­ing lis­ten­ers the abil­i­ty to know more about the artiste and the his­to­ry be­hind their mu­sic.

There are cur­rent­ly over 170 artistes, DJs and pro­duc­ers util­is­ing the app, such as in­ter­na­tion­al­ly-based lo­cal artistes Flipo, Krys­tal Khayne, Mark Hardy, Makamil­lion, Neb­u­la 868 and even DJ Adam, just to name a few.

Artistes fea­tured on the app al­so gain ex­po­sure through var­i­ous chan­nels in the Caribbean and in­ter­na­tion­al­ly as Chune is af­fil­i­at­ed with on­line ra­dio sta­tions such as Bang Ra­dio UK and Rid­dim Ra­dio.

The app, ini­tial­ly launched in Feb­ru­ary 2014, has now been re­vamped vi­su­al­ly to Chune 2.0 which will be avail­able to users on Ju­ly 30. Chune 2.0 promis­es to be vi­su­al­ly ap­peal­ing with faster load time of mu­sic se­lect­ed by users.

El­liott said he is quite im­pressed with the de­vel­op­ment of Chune as sev­er­al artistes in­clud­ing Free­town Col­lec­tive, Chro­mat­ics, Lord Re­la­tor, Rawkus Re­my, the Un­cov­ered team and Blaxx have giv­en great feed­back.

With Chune users in­creas­ing on the lo­cal front, El­liott plans to in­crease his vi­sion through­out the Caribbean.

You can find Chune at www.face­book.com/chunebiz, www.twit­ter.com/chunebiz, www.in­sta­gram.com/chunebiz or vis­it the of­fi­cial web site at www.chune.biz