MeeMix: Personalized Internet Radio

MeeMix allows users to create and share personalized Internet radio stations for free. The service also has built-in taste prediction technology which enables a combination of user selected and automatic music discovery. The company's business application is designed to personalize radio delivery, recommendations and ads by accurately predicting individual music taste.

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:

musiXmatch: next generation song lyrics API

musiXmatch (mXm) is a new startup that's aiming to build the next generation song lyrics API, providing detailed metadata about the artists who performed it, the genre, influences, related artists, and digital rights management for clearing content for distribution. The company has partnered with MusicBrainz to help acquire metadata, and recently raised 400K EUR (about 500K USD). While musiXmatch is presently a restricted alpha product, additional features will include:

• search lyrics using either unstructured queries or open source identifiers such as MusicBrainz;
• take advantage of metered search-engine friendly lyric displays without the worry of copyright infringement;
• obtain a complete list of performing artists, organized and filtered in a variety of ways, including biographies and images;
• obtain a complete discography for each performing artist, complete with release dates, tracks and cover art

Track and Share your Music Listening Activity with Like.fm

Indie Music Tech Exclusive:

Like.fm is a new music tech startup created by Chris Chen that allows users to seamlessly keep historical track of what they're listening to on sites like YouTube and Pandora (many more sites coming soon), recommend/rank artists and songs from iTunes, and create and share playlists from music sites with friends. Like.FM even summarizes a user's music listening activity, and automatically posts it to their Facebook profile.

It's quite robust, and can be downloaded as an unobtrusive, lightweight desktop client that integrates with iTunes and Winamp, or as a browser plugin (presently available for both Chrome and Safari) - just install and listen to music online like you normally do. Like.fm will then automatically keep track of your plays, and it's quite accurate too, with advanced scrobbling that checks for the validity of an artist, title, genre, tags and other metadata.

5 Ways to Broadcast Live Shows

Quick Post: There are dozens of ways fans can post video segments, or stream live concerts from their mobile phones, but below are 5 sites that can help artists professionally broadcast their live shows (in no particular order):

• Ustream
• Justin.tv
• Livestream
• Stickam
• Kyte

What did I miss? Which service do you recommend?

Influence your Local Music Scene with Gigwish

Gigwish is a webapp that enables music enthusiasts to help influence their local music scene by voting for artists to play in their area, and then sharing their votes with their friends to encourage additional voting. The goal for music fans is to generate enough votes to influence promoters, booking agencies and venues to hire the acts they want to see (might be useful for an artist's street team).

Billboard’s Music App Summit

Just a reminder, the submission deadline for Billboard’s Music App Awards is Friday, August 6th. Finalists will be notified by September 1st, and will be featured in a Billboard article listing the best apps of the year, and have the opportunity to demo their app onstage at The Music App Summit in San Francisco on October 5th, as well as receive free demo space in the exhibit area. Awards will be given in the following categories:

• Best Artist-based App
• Best Music Streaming App
• Best Music Engagement App
• Best Music Creation App
• Best Branded App
• Best Touring App

To submit an app, go here.

Play your Music from Google Docs

Cloud Music, a new iPhone/iPod touch/iPad app released yesterday allows users to play audio files (MP3, MP4 and .WAV) from their Google Docs. For example, you can upload an album from your computer as a folder to your Google docs with a cover image, and you will then see the cover while the album is being played on your iPhone. You can also share your music, and play music shared to you by your friends. It's the latest cloud-based music service I've written about over the past couple of years, and there will be many more to come as there's no doubt this is the music industry's future.


 

Free Concert Discovery App

Updated:
Flyer is a free concert discovery app that searches your iTunes music library and provides an up-to-date listing of shows for those artists based on the geographical area you define (see video demo below).

Presently in beta, the initial version of Flyer is a desktop-based app that utilizes the Bandsintown API, and works with both Macs and PCs using iTunes. If you have any questions/comments, please contact Shane O'Donnell.

Playlost: concept MP3 player

Playlost, a downloadable concept MP3 player created by Zach Dicklin allows users to visualize their entire music library in their browser as a randomized, hexagonal grid, and create elaborate playlists with long, snaking chains through a user's music collection. The concept player blends shuffle with freedom, and it's available for Mac and Windows users. Below is a demo of Playlost:

5 Rdio Features for Music Enthusiasts

I've been using Rdio a few weeks now thanks to Glenn Peoples, and I'm impressed with their service. Below are 5 features that make Rdio a great experience for music enthusiasts:

1. select and listen to a specific artist, album and/or a specific track
2. create and share custom playlists, subscribe to your friends' playlists, or collaborate on their playlists
3. effortlessly write a review for a song and/or album (this data could be a great resource for artists, labels, managers and the like)
4. great social interface allowing users to easily see what their friends are listening to (vice-versa), as well as other Rdio users, and who is listening to the music you like (creating new opportunities for music discovery)
5. nice visualization of music collections (i'm assuming they'll add more visualizations)

Rdio will likely influence other music service providers to modify their offering with similar features and design, benefiting all music listeners, but there are a few areas where Rdio can improve:

• increase content, especially from unsigned artists with services like CD Baby and Tunecore
• easier queue creation/management for individual songs and albums (e.g. the drop down to add is cumbersome)
• tighter integration of music recommendations based on a user's listening activity; it's a bit separated from the experience at present

MOG Launches Mobile Music App

MOG has just released their mobile music app for the iPhone, iTouch and Android devices. For $9.99 per month, subscribers get access to more than 8 million songs with unlimited listening and all-you-can-eat downloads, as well as MOG’s desktop and online service.

Features include:

• Unlimited downloads: Subscribers can download any song or album directly to their phones and continue to listen to music even when out of cell or WiFi range.
• On-demand streaming: Unlimited listening to any artist, album, or song at any time, with no ads and no limit on the number of consecutive tracks by a single artist
• MOG Radio: Only MOG offers the patent-pending “MOG Mobius” music discovery engine, which enables users to control the mix of similar artists, from true "artist only" radio up to a full mix of similar artists.
• Playlist access between website and mobile: Make playlists on MOG.com and access them on your phone. Favorite tracks that are bookmarked from the web are then integrated into a user’s personal library and appear in favorites on the mobile app.
• High quality audio: Songs can be downloaded at the standard rate of 64 kbps or users can turn on HQ downloads (up to 320 kbps) to save the song as a larger file with higher audio quality. This gives listeners the option of receiving high quality downloads for maximum audio fidelity.
• Multi-tasking: Android users can continue to play music with MOG while using other applications. (MOG will add multi-tasking for iOS 4 users)

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.

MP3tunes Launches Personal Cloud Music Service

MP3tunes launched its personal cloud music service today called, "Buy Anywhere, Listen Everywhere." Essentially, their service makes it possible to buy music from a variety of digital music vendors and play them on a variety of devices. For example, a user can buy a song using their Android and listen to it within minutes on their iPod:


Conversely, songs purchased from iTunes on a PC can be played almost immediately on an Android:



Presently, MP3tunes' Buy Anywhere, Listen Everywhere service works with these digital music stores:

• iTunes
• AmazonMP3
• Napster
• Walmart
• Zune
• 7digital
• Rhapsody
• ShockHound

And their service is compatible with these devices:

• iPhone 4
• iPhone 3GS
• iPhone 3G
• iPod touch
• HTC Aria
• HTC Desire
• HTC Dream
• HTC Hero
• HTC Legend
• HTC Magic
• HTC Tattoo
• HTC Evo 4G
• Google Nexus One
• Motorola Droid
• Motorola Backflip
• Motorola CLIQ
• myTouch 3G Slide
• Droid Incredible
• Logitech Squeezebox
• RCA internet radios
• Reciva internet radios

MP3tunes has also updated their iPhone and Android applications.

Share your Music with Bln.kr

Bln.kr is a new webapp that allows you to easily share music you make on Twitter, Facebook and smartphones. While there are several startups providing similar services (e.g. Tinysong and Twiturm), Bln.kr is providing pro services, such as automatic QR Code creation, private sharing, multiple audio format support and more.

Merge.fm: where fans and artists share in the songwriting process

Update (see below):
Merge.fm is a new collaboration app that helps artists open-up the creative process and share the songwriting experience with their fans (see video demo below).

The site has a great clean layout with intuitive features, and they are looking for bands and musicians artists to join as they just launched a couple of weeks ago, and it's free for artists, and the first 3 fans artists to email support@merge.fm with the coupon code "indiemusictech" will get one free year's subscription to Merge.fm (a $60 value).

Allowing fans to participate in the evolution of your music, and even provide feedback to the songs you're working on is a great way to develop and strengthen loyalty with your fans.

IOUmusic: crowdfunding for artists and fans

Yesterday, IOUmusic launched the public beta of their crowdfunding app for the music industry, providing artists with a creative alternative to financing their careers by allowing fans to make donations to artists they want to support. Looks like they're open to how they evolve their product, so connect with them and provide your feedback.


 

TuneCloud: store, share and play your music from anywhere

TuneCloud, a new cloud service to store, share and play your music online is preparing to release its public beta, and they're accepting early registrations. While I haven't seen their service, it seems it will be similar to TunesBag.

10 Invites to Rdio

Have you been wanting to try the new social music service, Rdio? Thanks to Glenn Peoples, I now have an account, and I'm giving away all of my 10 invites to readers of IMT. All you have to do is post a comment requesting an invite by logging in with your Twitter account below, and I will randomly select 10 winners.

Essentially, the invite will give you a free, 3 day preview of Rdio, but after that, you'll have to pay. So while the invite will get you in so you can try Rdio, you'll have to start paying after 3 days (please note, Rdio only works within the US at this time).

Below is a brief feature tour of Rdio from lifehacker:

Referral Marketing and the Music Industry

There are a number of music related websites that have attempted to reward fans with cash, merchandise and/or other discounts for promoting, reviewing or selling songs for artists, such as Burnlounge, People's Music Store, Slicethepie and Zaploop, among others, but do they work. Do artists support these initiatives? Do music fans use them? What are your thoughts?

The latest is Webceleb: