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:

The Changing Demographics of Social Media

Flowtown created this nice infographic yesterday illustrating how the average age for social media users is increasing. For example, the average Facebook user is now 38 years old, and 64% of all Twitter users are now over the age of 35. Does this shift change social media strategies for artists, labels and online music services? Probably, but it would be useful to know what sociological factors are driving the increase, how are these age groups using social media, which countries and cities represent the greatest increases, etc.

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.

Twestival-fm

This Thursday, March 25, 2010, thousands of people in hundreds of cities around the world will come together at local Twestivals to raise money for education related projects in their areas - from building schools, to supplying classrooms with computers. All of the events are organized entirely by volunteers, and 100% of all ticket sales and donations will go directly to their specific, local educational related projects.

To help raise awareness and donations, SoundCloud has created Twestival-fm, a geographical music site for listening and downloading songs in exchange for donating to this year's Twestival, but they need help from artists willing to donate a song or two. So, if you have some music to promote and a Twitter account then please visit Twestival-fm.

According to Dave Haynes of SoundCloud, "it's really simple, you provide the music and your fans donate. 100% of the proceeds then go to Concern Worldwide, a charity that Twestival chose to support this year's event because of their great work bringing education to the world's poorest children." Hats off to SoundCloud for taking initiative and creating Twestival-fm. Not only are they helping to raise $5,000 for Twestival, but they also have a matching grant too, so every dollar raised from Twestival.fm will be doubled!

This year's Twestival follows the success of last year's event, which was held in 202 international cities to support @charitywater, which assists in providing safe, clean drinking water. Over 1,000 volunteers and 10,000 donors raised over $250k, which resulted in more than 55 wells in Uganda, Ethiopia and India, having a direct impact on over 17,000 people. For more information, follow @twestival.

Band Metrics Releases Public Beta

Its been a long time coming, but I'm happy to announce that we finally released the public beta of Band Metrics this morning from Midem.

What took so long? Great question. We had to re-engineer the entire system, as the previous two versions were flawed. This was a difficult decision that consumed our time, but it's better to get the architecture right before releasing it to the public. We now feel confident we've built a system, which is entirely Ruby/Rails that will not only collect, store and analyze artist data accurately, but will be fast and scale rapidly, as we also moved our entire system into the cloud via Engine Yard. As an example, Band Metrics now pulls-in and displays initial artist data within seconds, not days or hours. Needless to say, I'm proud of our developers.

We also streamlined the site, and added a couple of new features, including Fan Segmentation and Influence Measurement. Essentially, this allows artists, managers, labels and the like to see a breakdown of fans (based initially on Twitter comments), and a fan's influence among their friends (below is a brief screencast).

We still have lots of work to do, including design enhancements and new features, as well as incorporate our existing analytical tools into the new site (we ran out of time as we wanted to release at Midem), so we greatly appreciate your ongoing support, as this is just the beginning!

5 Music Tech Twitter Lists to Follow

What lists did I miss? Please comment your suggestions, but this will get you started:

• @jherskowitz/musictech
• @bobmoz/musicnerds
• @MusicGeekMgmt/musicpeeps
• @nancybaym/smartypantsmusicpeople
• @Spartz/music-industry

Benefits of Twitter Lists for Artists

Most everyone now has Lists enabled for their Twitter account, but what does this mean for you, the artist? Well, there are numerous ways to gain value from them. Below are 4 simple ways you could use Twitter Lists as a tool to help you maximize your tour and net the most income while on the road:

1. Keep track of other bands and musicians by region (e.g. Southeast, Northwest, Central, etc.), so while you're on the road you could see what they're doing and possibly headline swap, invite them to share the stage with you, meetup, etc.
2. Keep track of venues by region. Similar to above, the difference is that you're looking to see if there are any last minute openings or opportunities you may have not been aware of before hitting the road.
3. Keep track of your top fans by city (fan segmentation). Building relationships with your fans and superfans is vitally important, especially if you're trying to pack the house each night, and this is a great way to segment them via Twitter (tip: you may want to keep these lists private).
4. Discover. By doing the above, or creating another type of list for your band, you're going to discover some interesting people, artists, fans and more - nothing but a good thing, and it works equally for people discovering your band as you get added to Lists, which could open up more opportunities for you, so be creative and build some Lists.

There are lots of other ways Twitter Lists can help your band, these are just some examples to get you started. How do you plan to use Lists?

Tweet My Song

Is TweetMySong the future of music promotion on Twitter, or a tool for music spam?