Music Hack Day London

UPDATED 2 (links fixed, apps added):

Another Music Hack Day (London) was held this past weekend. Below are the hacks:

• Paul G music-on-hold hack (call his conference number and select the music you want to hear
• Cuttle (access music library on iDevice under iOS 4, and run a live remix using realtime beat tracker)
• Big Piano (inspired by the movie Big - big floor piano that you can make music with)
• Future of music 2010 (a Mac OS X app that scans your iTunes library and computes the music you are not supposed to be listening to anymore based on your preferences, and then deletes it from iTunes and your hard drive)
• Gramophone (browse around the world, pick a month from history and find songs that were played live then and there)
• HOTTTABS (crawls the web for you and retrieve the guitar tabs of the hottests songs of the moment according to their level of difficulty)
• BumbleTab patient guitar tutor (a very patient guitar tutor)
• Daily Sample Set (ruby script that pulls the hottest downloadable uncompressed Creative Commons tracks from SoundCloud within last 24 hours)
• Piracy (android app that allows you to drop tracks from your music collection on your current location, allowing others to grab them if they're close enough)
• Playlistr (imports/exports XSPF playlists, imports tracklists from the BBC Programmes website, links to stream on Spotify and buy from 7digital)
• Disco Snake (play the classic game snake, but you have multiple pieces of food available at any time, and eating a piece of food adds a note to a playing sequence with a pitch and velocity corresponding to the position of the food, and crashing in to your tail results in switching to a new set of samples)
• Singalong (quick access to tablature from your favorite bands)
• Speakatron (a program that looks at you through your web cam and plays a sound when you open your mouth)
• The Cut Liberator (a python script to autogenerate cut up hip hop mixes)
• Roomba Recon (The inspiration for this project is a robot solving a maze. Or cleaning a house. The general idea is to construct coherent playlists that traverse from a start to end song on the Soundcloud with minimal prior knowledge.)
• Webloop_Revisited (The webloop, in its first incarnation remotely presented at music hack day STHLM, is an ongoing experiment in using modern browsers to generate sound. On one hand. On the other hand it tries to find ways to allow people to collaboratively create music.)
• Earth Destroyers (For my London Music Hackday hack I built a web app called 'Earth Destroyers'. Give Earth Destroyers a band name and it will show you how eco-friendly the band's touring schedule is. Earth Destroyers calculates the total distance traveled from the first gig to the last along with the average distance between shows. If an artist has an average inter-show distance of greater than a 1,000 km I consider it an 'Earth Destroyer'. The app also shows you a Google map so you can see just how inefficient the tour is.)
• 7digital Never-ending Popquiz ("Arcade style" never-ending popquiz. Reaching next level will bring new type of questions and they get more difficult with each level. Wrong answers cost you lives. You can choose different genres to play and questions are generated randomly from top artists tagged with this genre. Options for answers are generated from similar artists to the correct answer.)
• 7x7 (a square of 7x7 notes, where the notes can be selected by using the mouse. All notes within the selected rectangle are played, creating various chords. When notes are selected they are played according to an Attack-Duration-Decay envelope, where the user has no control of the parameters.)
• MixCloudPad (a sit back way of enjoying MixCloud content on your iPad)
• MashBox (The user selects a track and the system mixes it with another that is chosen at random (within limits), and uploads to http://soundcloud.com/mashbox)
• SongkickGiglister (An Android oriented Songkick gig lister for people who agree to go to gigs before they've heard the band. Fetches the upcoming gigs for a given user, pulling in data about the bands: links to Spotify, tracks from around the web etc.)
• Accessible music (This hack is a web browser where songs are triggered with mouse over movements)
• MuseScore OSC Remote (several musicians scoring together)
• I was there (tour t-shirts from your Songkick gigography)
• Gowalla for SoundCloud (check in with Gowalla to a particular venue and get a free SoundCloud stream/download)
• Cleversounds (next time you visit a place with a cleversounds jukebox (at the moment, just laptops), you will be played artists that you like)
• Music Mag (create a music magazine from Guardian content)
• The Sound of Tweets (simple web app to turn tweets into pieces of music)
• Swearaoke (this is a game where you play Guitar Hero guitar, and this makes the words to a song)
• Auto Score Tubing (YouTube.com is stuffed with great musical performances. Imagine these videos playing along with the musical score! While manually synchronizing a score measure per measure along with the video is possible, automatic synchronizing would be even greater.)
• The Sound of Data About Justin Bieber (exploring how fan data could be presented not as visualizations, but instead as sounds)
• Political Echonalysis (exploring the style of politcal speech by analysing the audio data)
• Not That Song (add songs from your 7digital locker to playlist that tells you how well those tracks fit together, or not)
• Head Tracking Sound Installation (breakout Game with Procedurally Generated Audio - actions in the game affect the audio output)
• BBC Dance & Electronica Archive & Recommendations (tracklist archives for all dance & electronica shows, finds listed tracks on SoundCloud, after entering your Last.FM username, it recommends artists based on the _complete_ tracklist)
• Mortal Songbat (a musical version of Mortal Kombat)
• Radio Map (sweeping the frequency spectrum on an old analogue radio to the digital web-radio world)
• SoundWheel (Sound Wheel is a circular synthesizer that uses synesthesia and variable intonation to make funky sounding basslines)
• Chatter-FM (call a number and leave a message that will be uploaded to soundcloud)
• Nirtous Oxide (webcam midi controller that tracks colours / fruits)

It's inspiring to see what can be developed in a weekend - congrats to all! While I haven't experimented with any of the above hacks, based on the brief summaries they've provided, my favorites are Disco Snake, Earth Destroyers, I was there, Gowalla for SoundCloud and Mortal Songbat. Btw, if you are not familiar with Music Hack Day, watch these two videos:

Fairshare Music: philanthropic downloads for the music industry

Recently launched Fairshare Music is a UK-based music download site that donates half the profit from the sale of each song to charity. Presently, Fairshare has over 8.5 million tracks and 11 charity organizations with more coming soon. Fairshare could be a useful micro donation application for charities looking to create unique fundraising campaigns, and/or create an additional fundraising vehicle, especially if Fairshare had donation matching partners.

Some of the Challenges Artists Face Promoting their Music (a video)

While concept stage Immitter seems to be trying to develop a music promotion engine, I'm not sure what tools they'll provide to artists, practically speaking, as they haven't yet developed their initial service (they're still very early stage), but this is a creative video about some of the challenges musicians and bands face vying for exposure to their music:



Founder and CEO, Jermaine Kelly said they're pitching at DEMO this Monday.

How Does SoundExchange Work

Curious as to how SoundExchange works, and how it can benefit you? Then check out this short video they created a couple of days ago:

ReverbNation Partners with Label 2.0

ReverbNation has teamed up with the Internet music marketing community, Label 2.0 to offer advanced music promotion training for their 450,000+ members called, “Advanced Tips." This free step-by-step training module located in ReverbNation's Control Room helps "users to learn how to fully utilize their ReverbNation memberships." Presently, there are 8 chapters, from the "basics of getting started" to more advance customization and features, but Label 2.0 will continually update and add to this module as new tools and enhancements from ReverbNation are added, as well as "how to build the ultimate website using Wordpress and ReverbNation." See what this module is all about below - looks really informative! Hats off to Greg and Eric for a job well done!

MOG Announces Premium Digital Music Service

If you haven't heard yet, MOG announced yesterday that it will launch MOG All Access, a new digital music service for North America, by Thanksgiving 2009.

According to MOG Founder and CEO David Hyman, “Our goal with MOG All Access was to build the best service for listening to and discovering music, period. To accomplish this, we're providing access to millions of songs (just about everything), with a drop dead easy way to hear any song or album you like in an instant, from the convenience of your web browser. You'll get access to MOG radio, a revolutionary listening experience that will forever change how you discover music and truly redefines what radio is, and killer tools for discovery through other users of the service.  And you get it all monthly for the price of a beer ($5 USD per month)." Hyman explained, “For $5 a month, you can download five songs from iTunes or have access to millions of songs on demand, better radio, a world of relevant articles, reviews, news and lyrics, and a community of fellow fans and expert music sources with whom you can discover new artists, share playlists and explore music.”

According to their press release, they've partnered with all of the major labels including Universal Music Group, Sony Music, Warner Music Group and EMI Music, plus thousands of independents via IODA, Beggars Group and more, with unrestricted access to over 5 million tracks.

Sounds great; I can't wait to try it! Curious though as to when they'll offer this service globally.

Free All Music Set to Release

Just learned from Urvaksh Karkaria at the Atlanta Business Chronicle that there's a new ad-supported music download service about to launch called, Free All Music, which just raised $1 million in seed capital. According to Urvaksh's article, before a user downloads a song, he/she views/listens to a 15 to 20 second ad, and then additional advertising during the download process. Sounds similar to the now defunct SpiralFrog which I wrote about 2 years ago. Hopefully they'll have far better success, as I'm excited to see the growth of music tech startups in Atlanta, including: Amplified, Band Metrics, BeatTweet, Khu.sh (laDiDa), Maestro, Neurotic Media, and Zooz Mobile.

NECODO's Open Platform for Selling Digital Music

While the old digital music store is still around, NECODO is now focused on developing an open platform for record labels, digital distributors, online retailers and artists to sell their music. Essentially, they're building a customizable commerce platform for the music industry. Looks like it's a beta offering so I'm just going to provide a quick overview below. For more information, go here.

• catalog management via a simplified and easy-to-use CMS
• online wizard to quickly and easily create operational stores for single releases, your entire catalog, and/or one of your artists
• wholesale and custom pricing control
• retail offering  
• real-time sales reports
• Marketing tools such as widgets, buy buttons, and HTML links for websites, emails, social networks and blogs
• custom solutions
• an API 
• No start-up costs
• No monthly charges

Ian Rogers' Keynote Interview from NARM 2009

Ian Rogers of Topspin gave an insightful keynote interview on the music industry at NARM about two weeks ago that's not to be missed:

Selling your Music via Smirp is so Simple it's Brilliant!

Last month I was contacted by Smirp, and I finally had time today to explore their service. I'm amazed at how easy it is to create an account, upload your music, and sell it with fan determined pricing - to the point of elegant brilliance!

Inspired by In Rainbows, Smirp provides you with the ability to create your own "name your price" page for your music, allowing your fans to pay whatever they desire, which could be more or less than you expect, but also allowing you to set a minimum price. After you receive payment, a link is sent to your customer's email address. After 12 hours, the link is no longer valid, helping to prevent your music from being illegally copied. Here's an example of the band, theWANDAS using Smirp.

Uploading your music files to Smirp is easy too. Essentially, you can upload almost any file of just about any size. Once uploaded, you provide the title, pricing options, give it a unique url, and can even set a release date for timed releases.

Presently, Smirp has two pricing options, a free plan where they take 20 percent of each sale and a professional account with a few more features for a flat rate of $6 per month.

Smirp is a great hassle free way to quickly sell your music with fan determined pricing. My only suggestion at this point is Smirp should create the ability to listen to each song before buying, but hats off to a great app. For more information, go here.

CD Baby to Unveil New Website and Single Sales in July

Its been a couple of years since CD Baby made significant changes to the design of their web site, but in about a month (July) they're going to unveil a new sleek design, while maintaining a minimalist UI (one of the design attributes which helped make CD Baby successful). Below is a screenshot that Brian Felsen posted about a week ago - note the cool new logo!

They're also rolling out some new features with the new website, such as the ability to sell singles at the price artists want to charge. These improvements should help increase revenue for artists, as more of their fans will opt to purchase music from CD Baby. Not to mention, artists should encourage their fans to purchase their music directly form CD Baby instead, as they will earn a larger percentage of the sales price for each song sold directly on cdbaby.com.

Serving Your Fans: The Trent Reznor Case Study

You may have seen this before, but I just watched Techdirt founder Michael Masnick's keynote presentation at The Leadership Music Digital Summit, and I gotta say, it was fantastic, a must watch for anyone in the music industry. Here's the one he gave at Midem, but I missed due to meetings:

The difference between today's presentation and the one he gave at Midem is an additional 160 slides for a total of 440! Hopefully, the folks at LMDS will post the video soon.

Guest Post: Do Bands and Musicians Understand What is Happening Online Right Now?

The guest post below was written by my friend, Greg Rollett of Endagon Innovations. Greg writes regularly on Gen-Y Rock Stars, a Social Music Marketing Blog and Resource for indie musicians. To get a free copy of his Social Media Sites for Musicians and the Rock Star Tool Kit, go here. If you'd like to reach Greg directly, please send him an email (rollettmarketing [at] gmail [dot] com).

(confused music photo by Adam Schilling)

Do Bands and Musicians Understand What is Happening Online Right Now?
I ask myself this question everyday when I see all of the small companies, corporations, brands and innovators taking advantage of tools, resources and conversations that are happening every second of every day online. I get scared when I see musicians still parking their homepage on Myspace, blasting out self promotions with no regards to getting real fans to have conversations with and not accepting feedback from that promotion.

We can start with Twitter, since everyone from the president to late night newbie Jimmy Fallon to, even, Facebook is taking notice of what is happening on this platform. Every second, there are thousands of links being shared, videos being passed, questions being asked and answered and music being streamed directly because of Twitter. In the music world there has been uproar of music related services and platforms devoted to heighten the music experience of Twitter. Roll call please:

Twisten
TinySong
Blip.fm
Tweettj
Song.ly
playTwitter
Twiturm
TwittyTunes (FireFox Plugin)

Then there are the Music Marketing people providing resources for how musicians can leverage twitter:

• Bob Baker’s Music Twitter Resources
• Ariel’s Publicity Twitter Roadmap

And don’t forget the ridiculously long crowd-sourced list of musicians on Twitter

• Musicians On Twitter – (Google spreadsheet)

But did you know that? Do bands see what is going on here?
Technology shrank physical sales and transformed us into a digital world. If you are willing to accept that fact, and embrace the tools, tactics and hard work that it takes to make these things work, there is a great chance that your music can be in more iPods, more YouTube channels, more blogs, more playlists, more countries, more options that ever before.

The key to getting the word out to musicians is to prove that this stuff we are preaching actually works. The reason Myspace friend adders/blasters/spammers were extremely popular and ultimately helped to ruin the site was because they worked. It was a numbers game, reach enough people and a few become fans.

The reality is that numbers were inflated, play counts skyrocketed and bands felt like the king of the mountain. Then you booked a show off your Myspace stats, invited the local music industry players who were also impressed, and you played an unrehearsed live show to the bartenders, wait staff and your frat buddies.

The reality is that developing fan relationships is the key to all the tools and websites out there today. The name of the game has become, how many people can I connect with, on a personal level?

• Can you broadcast your show via UStream and connect with fans that may never get to see you live?
• Can you throw a Meebo widget on your blog and talk to fans every Monday night for an hour about life, music, hobbies and pet peeves?
• Can you take photos at your shows with real fans, post them on Flickr, Facebook and Myspace, tag them and get the fans excited to tell their friends about the night? Can you do it the next morning and not wait 3 weeks to get around to it?
• Can you write a blog post so inspiring that 20 of your fans retweet it, their friends see it and pass it on and all of a sudden you get new traffic from new fans?
• Can you remember to send your monthly newsletter out every month? Can you use Champion Sound or FanBridge to collect emails on your websites and at your shows to grow your fan base?
• Can you look at your band's analytics to see how popular your music is, with whom, in what social networks, gauge where your fans are coming from, etc.?
• Can you create products on demand? Special shirts for special shows? Audiolife can do this for you, instantly. What about a lyrics book or a tour journal? Can you publish that as an eBook or physical book that someone can print on demand (think Lulu)?

The idea that musicians can now create content, have their fans talk about it directly to the band, and then have the band comment back while measuring the process and results is something that is so inspiring, it’s hard to find a reason to argue against it. Yes, it takes time, it might take some money, but this is your life, your business and your future.

Do you understand what is happening? Bands, do you get it?

Revised BeatPick: Pre-Cleared Music Licensing

European-based BeatPick has re-launched as an easy-to-use, one-stop online music licensing service for both commercial use (e.g. TV, film, advertising, etc.), and non-commercial use that includes free music downloads. Presently, they have over 200 artists from over 40 countries with about 5,000 songs in their catalog from just about every genre. Additionally, their artist agreement is non-exclusive, can be terminated at anytime, and artists are paid 50 percent of the earnings.

Leadership Music Digital Summit 2009

In its fifth consecutive year, the 2009 Leadership Music Digital Summit in Nashville has an impressive agenda this year. If you attended Midem last week, this should be a nice follow-up conference, as there seems to be a focus this year on the value of understanding the actions and behaviors of an artist's fans. What's nice about this summit is that it's an intimate gathering (about 1,000 attendees), providing more opportunity for conversations with other music industry professionals. Not to mention, the most expensive ticket is only $179, and it's in the Music City!

According to their email, the attendance breakdown is as follows:

• 30 percent are executives and management from the majors and indies: record labels, publishers, PROs, marketing companies, etc.
• 30 percent represent artist or songwriter teams: managers, publicists, attorneys, business managers, fan club managers, outsourced marketers, etc.
• 15 percent are actual creators themselves: artists, songwriters, producers, etc.
• and 25 percent come from various media, tech companies, startup entrepreneurs, organization heads, students, academia, etc.

Band Metrics will be presenting as well, so please say hello, or email me so we can find some time to chat. I will be arriving on Sunday, March 22 and will depart in the evening on Wednesday, March 25.

Introducing Audiolife: A Conversation with Brandon Hance

Are you looking for a single location to create, sell and manage custom swag, physical CDs, digital music, and even ringtones across multiple websites, blogs and social networks? If yes, than Audiolife may be what you need. They're still in beta, but this music tech startup has potential with a minimalistic, fast and easy-to-use UI.

For additional information about AudioLife, check out their video, or you can read my interview with Co-Founder Brandon Hance below:

Was curious, why did you start Audiolife?

Brandon: We started Audiolife because we wanted to help create a "middle class" in the industry. We wanted to empower musicians to build a sustainable career doing what they love doing most- music. Putting together a comprehensive e-commerce solution takes lots of time, money and expertise- most of which artists have very little of. We wanted to create a solution that was easy, free, and powerful that would let them sell all of their digital and physical products from one central location.

Good stuff, how does AL make money, and what % do do you guys take from DD sales, physical sales, merch, etc.?

Brandon: We like to think of it as having a partnership with artists- we make money when they make money. For each product (downloads, Cds, etc.) there is a minimum price that has our cost included, and we give artists the ability to set their own retail prices on top of it. For example, we'll manufacture and ship the CD directly to a fan for $5, so if the artists sells a CD for $15, they'd make $10 profit/CD. The beauty here is that artists have no up front costs for the CD's, no membership costs, and no hassle of making, shipping, etc. They simply upload their designs, set their prices and begin selling immediately. They have the flexibility to change their music, artwork and prices as often as they'd like...for example, artists can have a live CD for every show.

Very cool! One thing I like about AL are the step-by-step wizards you created for an artist to add merch, DD, ringtones, etc. What features do you see adding in the future?

Brandon: We are in the process of adding a comprehensive record label solution, warehousing and fulfillment services, and a re-sizable and re-skinnable storefront. There are a handful of other really exciting things in the pipeline, but I don't want to let the cat out of the bag yet.

Gotcha; no worries, so how long have you guys been building AL and can you provide some details about the team and your background?

Brandon: We founded Inhance Media in June of 2005 and Audiolife about one year ago. There are 3 founders: Brandon Hance, Aaron Wiener and Nishit Rathod. Aaron is the musician that we essentially built the business around. Nishit is a PhD computer scientist/musician and I was a music business major at USC and worked in the industry as a music manager prior to starting Audiolife.

Nice! Are you guys working full time on AL? If so, how are you all funded? Self, Angel, Venture, etc.?

Brandon: We're working double time :-) and we’re Angel Funded.

LOL! I definitely understand, can you provide any details about the angel round?

Brandon: We did a seed round, Series A, and Series A-1

Congrats! One last question, do you have any other info you would like to provide/share that we didn’t discuss?

Brandon: just that companies like Audiolife and Band Metrics give artists the power of a record label- they can literally run their entire business through us, but they still have to have the skill, discipline and drive to DO IT! I've found that artists get very excited about services (not just ours) but don’t get around to it. And this is the most exciting time in the history of the music industry for up-and-coming bands if they take advantage of all of the opportunities that are out there.

No doubt - well said Brandon! :-)

Rumblefish Agreement with YouTube is Most Significant Music Tech Deal of 2008

This afternoon I reflected a little bit on the last 12 months of news from the music tech industry, and I would submit that the Rumblefish Agreement with YouTube is the most significant music tech deal of 2008. A bold claim? Maybe, but hundreds of millions of people are watching billions of videos each month when you consider the entire global Internet population. That's a ton of potential revenue for artists and labels working with Rumblefish, and the deal will surely bring thousands of new artists to Rumblefish.

Another way to look at this deal is to conduct a simple search for videos on YouTube. It seems there are are currently about 360 million videos on YouTube. Even if you cut that number in half to account for duplicates, vlogs, channels, removed videos, erroneous search results etc., you're still talking about 120 million plus videos, and growing every minute, a trajectory that seems to be in line with Kansas State University's YouTube statistics from January through March of 2008.

It's easy to see that these numbers represent substantial revenue opportunities for the music industry, and I'm excited for artists, as this agreement will become an easy way for individuals to incorporate legal music into their videos.

So hats off to Rumblefish!

Amie Street Offering 50 Percent Discount on Entire Music Catalog

Just got an email from the good folks at Amie Street and they're offering a special holiday discount of 50% off any purchases from their best of 2008 list. Sweet! I'm gonna download The Walkmen's release, You & Me. And to sweeten the deal, Amie Street extended this deep discount to their entire music catalog!  So be sure to make your purchases soon as I doubt their offer will last long.

BitTorrent's Future

VentureBeat is reporting that DAG Ventures is scaling back its investment in BitTorrent from $17 million to $7 million. This is unfortunate, as I think BitTorrent has a useful service, not to mention I'm a big fan of Bram Cohen. However, both VentureBeat and TechCrunch seem to illustrate that the move has been in the making for months due in part to changes in their business model and a growing lack of confidence in the company.

Interesting developments, but I'm not surprised, as BitTorrent's service relative to the music industry is a bit cumbersome for general music enthusiasts. That is, the average music fan is just looking for quick access to music without having to download software or participate in a P2P network, one of the reasons why web apps like Hypem, Pandora and Last.fm, as well as playlist sites like blip.fm and playlist.com have experienced massive adoption rates. Even audiophiles download lossless recordings from other places besides BitTorrent (e.g. Archive.org).

It's hard to say what will become of BitTorrent, but I wish them the best in the ever evolving music industry.

Interview with Fairtilizer

Curious about Fairtilizer and how musicians could benefit from using the service? My email interview below with co-founder, Oliver Rosset should answer some of your questions:

1) Describe Fairtilizer in three sentences or less?

"It's a track centric application where artists and labels and media can share, distribute and get stats around their tracks in a private or public way."

2) Why should an artist use Fairtilizer (i.e. what are the benefits to an artist)?

"Fairtilizer is an easy and simple way to service music in a private way by IM, emails etc ...one upload only for all needs and one single page for monitoring data from the web strong communities of music, a-list bloggers, artists and labels already using it."

3) How many artists are using Fairtilizer? How many songs are in the Fairtilizer catalog? On average, how many transactions (downloads and plays) of music occur each day within the Fairtilizer network?

• 1000 artists (100 new artists each day)
• 300 plus songs
• 300 plus labels
• 60k 30 sec streams a day, and around 8-10k downloads each day 

4) Does Fairtilizer charge artists for use of its service? If not, how does Fairtilizer make money? Is Fairtilizer planning to charge for its services? If so, please describe.

"It's free now. When we open the websites and have more services we will charge premiums accounts, note that the promotion part will stay free."

5) Are there any artist limitations when using Fairtilizer? Meaning, for example, is an artist limited to how many songs can be uploaded,played, distributed, shared or downloaded?

"No limitations for now."

6) What new tools is Fairtilizer developing for artists?

"We are currently working with labels on the choice of the upcoming features. We should have multi format files up this week with all conversations tools etc ...new player also beta testing now."