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:

TuneRights: a stock exchange for songs

Looking to sell shares of your songs, allowing you to receive capital upfront to finance your career, while allowing your fans to earn a portion of your song's revenue, then take a look at TuneRights. Essentially, this web app (still in beta) aims to provide a stock exchange for music, where songs work like stocks, and your fans can purchase ownership in them. While you may not want to sell much ownership in the songs you think are hits, TuneRights may be a great way to help motivate your fans further, as they will share and earn income from your success.

An Expanded List of Music Licensing Companies

The following is a guest post from James Allen. We've received a lot of interest about music licensing providers, so we thought we'd revise our initial list to include all of the companies that have been mentioned in the comments on IMT, and organize them in an alphabetical list below. If there are still more, please add them by commenting to this post. With almost two dozen providers listed below, and rumors that more are coming, which company do you think is the best?

• AudioMicro (license music for motion pictures, feature films, short films, radio advertisements, PowerPoint presentations, iPhone apps and more)
• BeatPick (showcasing 306 talented artists / 5000+ music tracks for film, TV, advertising and other use)
• Gamecues (music licensing for the gaming industry)
• Getty Images (music licensing through Pump Audio)
• iStockphoto (license royalty-free, pay-as-you-go audio tracks and Flash files)
• Jamendo PRO (music licenses for film, documentaries, promotional videos, websites and more)
• LicenseQuote (a music licensing e-commerce solution for music publishers, labels, artists or bands to license their songs and recordings directly from their own web sites while keeping 100% of the sales revenues)
• Magnatune (licensing for independent music)
• Mango Reel (a UK music consultancy with an extensive catalog of independent music for licensing within the television, film, video game and advertising industries)
• Matchless Music (a music licensing site which helps Indie musicians license their tunes to clients in television, film, video games, commercials and the web)
• Music Dealers (a full-service music licensing company that connects quality artists from around the world with leading brands, networks, advertising agencies, film production houses and gaming companies)
• NaxosLicensing (music licensing for classical music, from Bach to Wagner)
• Pump Audio (artists and labels communicate directly with those looking to license music for TV, film, commercials, etc. without giving up any ownership)
• Renommee (European based music licensing provider)
• Ricall (music licensing marketplace, connecting users wanting to license music directly with the relevant copyright owners)
• Rumblefish (licensing for television, film, advertisements, websites, videos, games, podcasts, and sonic branding - e.g. your music inside your local Gap)
• Sentric Music (has contacts across the globe that look for opportunities for their artists music in TV, advertising, film and games)
• SoundLounge (music consultancy helping clients to license their music across all platforms and territories)
• SoundReef (private beta service exchanging music for promotion in television, film, advertising, etc.)
• YookaMusic (a music licensing marketplace for music supervisors, marketing/advertising firms and the like looking to license music, as well as those providing music to license like artists and labels)
• YouLicense (music licensing marketplace, enabling artists and those seeking music to contact each other directly)

Bebot: animated synthesizer for the iPhone

Thanks to Jean Burgess for the tweet about Bebot, a fun animated synthesizer for your iPhone:

Jelli Interview

Below is an email interview with Jelli, a new social music service that provides listeners with real-time control over what gets played online and on terrestrial radio via real-time voting, and they just released their public beta last night. I've also embedded a short video about Jelli below as well.

How does it work (technically and practically)?
Jelli users control what plays via Jelli’s website, where they can choose from a list of stations, view all the songs available for that station, and collaborate with the rest of the listening community to decide what is played. Listeners can tune in to Jelli online, or on whatever radio station is currently broadcasting Jelli programming.

On the Jelli website, each station’s playlist is 100% community-controlled and dynamically generated based on real-time voting. The station’s catalog is exposed to users, so they can search for songs they want to hear. Each song has a score, determined by votes, and the highest-scoring songs will make it on the air. What plays next is always up for grabs and determined completely by the community’s votes - the next song isn’t selected until seconds before it goes on the air.

Additional gaming elements allow users to earn even more power over the playlist, with items such as Rockets (which boost a song to the top of the list) and Bombs (which destroy a song’s score), and features such as group chat and messaging enable listeners to band together to decide what plays, create a themed playlist, or even lobby for help to get a particular song on the air. The community can also vote on whether they like what’s currently playing, and if enough of the online audience doesn’t like a song, they can pull it off the air.

The Jelli service is powered by Jelli’s automated platform, which handles the Jelli gaming system, content and catalog management, audio playstream system, real-time audio mixing, dynamic audio content, and announcement of game activity via text-to-speech technology. Jelli’s Station Server integrates with stations’ existing broadcast infrastructure to deliver a DMCA and FCC-compliant playlist – generated by the online community for that station – directly to the station for broadcast. Stations that broadcast Jelli programming have their own co-branded destination sites on the Jelli website.

Who are Jelli's competitors and how is Jelli different from them?
As an online radio service, Jelli competes with services such as Pandora. As syndicated programming, Jelli’s competition includes other shows that stations could select to broadcast over the air. What makes Jelli different from others in these categories is the social nature of the service and the control it gives to listeners over what plays. Rather than a personalized music service, such as Pandora, or even an iPod, Jelli is a social stream where the music is selected by the entire listening community for a particular station – leading to new music discovery and always impromptu, community-driven playlists. As programming, Jelli brings a fresh approach to traditional radio, using the web to give the listening community control over what broadcasts on the air.

What are some reasons why someone would want to use Jelli?
Jelli is a fun social jukebox and great way to interact with other members of a station’s listening community. On Jelli, users do more than just listen – they participate, play, and discover new music.

When/why did Jelli form, and who is behind Jelli?
Jelli was founded in 2008 by internet veterans Michael Dougherty (Microsoft) and Jateen Parekh (Amazon), with the belief that a huge opportunity exists to bring something fresh to the radio industry. Jelli’s experienced team consists of ten members from Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, Aggregate Knowledge, etc., with proven experience launching award winning consumer services such as the Amazon Kindle, Tellme and ReplayTV. Jelli is seeking to completely transform traditional broadcasting, which still has massive reach and usage but is becoming less relevant to a new generation of web users. Jelli is reinventing what is possible with traditional broadcasting empowering listeners to interact in a dynamic web experience.

How does Jelli make money?
Jelli’s business model reflects the standard economics for radio syndication: advertising barter and/or licensing fees. Cost structure and copyright frameworks in traditional broadcasting are very attractive/established. Jelli’s partners license Jelli’s innovative programming and pay copyright royalties (onair / online) and delivery expenses (FM / streaming).

Number 9, Number 9, Number 9....

There'll be a great deal of coverage about this today, so I'll just make one brief observation. Last year, Rock Band sold over 28 million downloads, but because of the Beatles edition, expect that number to be closer to 100 million (my prediction) by the end of this year - I can't wait to play it this weekend!

Music Licensing Landscape

Below is a brief list of some of the companies that can help bands and musicians place their music in film, television, commercials, games, etc. What companies did I miss?

Rumblefish (licensing for television, film, advertisements, websites, videos, games, podcasts, and sonic branding - e.g. your music inside your local Gap)
Gamecues (licensing for the gaming industry)
YouLicense (music licensing marketplace - essentially, their system enables artists and those seeking music to conduct business directly with each other)
Pump Audio (artists can license their music in television and advertising without giving up any ownership
BeatPick (music licensing provider)
Ricall (music licensing marketplace, connecting users wanting to license music directly with the relevant copyright owners)
SoundReef (private beta service exchanging music for promotion in television, film, advertising, etc.)

ArtistDish Releases Podcast #5

The ArtistDish released its 5th podcast today about some of the shifts and trends in print and digital media, gatekeepers, fandom, the gaming industry and more. It's our longest episode to date (1 full hour), and we are joined by music industry veteran, Barney Kilpatrick of Rattlesby Records, and one of our advisors, who provides a great deal of insight and sage advice, so if you’re an artist, you definitely want to listen to this episode.

Special thanks to Montana Skies for providing the intro music with their song, Gringo Flamenco.