With the high penetration of smart phones, it’s hard to find a youngster not listening to music on headphones, on the way to work, school or just walking around the city.

Although they can’t live without music, listening to music on the go is ironically a big safety issue. Since 2011, traffic accidents have increased by 300% in China because people wearing headphones drown out ambient warning sounds.

Hence Vice created Mutesic, a mobile phone add-on to strengthen its positioning as the youth cultural brand.

Mutesic is a completely new technology, tailor-made for this application. It has a unique processing platform: a service-based app, memory resident, booted-with-the-system, with a front-end shown within notification bar. It is always available for quick user access, regardless if user is currently running a different app in the full-screen. The app customizes on Android OS with a new feature: location-sensitive sound volume control, based on the city critical area maps specifically generated for the app. Each city critical map was generated using tailor-made production tools to harvest maps from available map sources, having to analyze them, pin-point street intersections and other potentially critical areas. Based on the current device location, movement speed and direction, app will estimate if user is close to a critical area, and sets media sound volume to appropriate level. To conserve battery use, app will be listening to location updates and do volume control only when music media is being played. Users can use their favorite media player app, while Mutesic will silently run in the background and take over sound volume control.

While it’s successfully launched in China tier 1 cities (Shanghai, Beijing & Guangzhou) now, Vice is looking to adapt this app nationwide and also international use in the near future so that more youths can benefit from it.

The overall Brand awareness almost doubled with 48% increment

In less than 30 days:

- More than 40,000 Downloads

- Over 3.8 Million Media Impressions

- 55,988 Shares on Social Media

- Over 100 Pieces of Media Coverage

- Followers on Douban (China’s most popular interests based SNS), Weibo and Youku (China’s equivalent of Facebook and Youtube) increased by 68%, 80% and 54% respectively.

But the most important thing is music lovers in China can now lower their risk at busy roads.