Boston Music Technology Group Meetup
Did you know that there is a Boston-based Meetup group for music-tech entrepreneurs, hackers, founders, developers, designers, programmers, musicians, idea-ists, scientists, and data experts? It’s the Boston Music-Technology Group organized by David Blutenthal. Join if you are interested in bumping elbows with others with a similar passion for music and technology.
The next meetup is tomorrow, (Wednesday 9/11). I’ll be giving a short talk on creating dynamic music apps in the browser. Looks like the event is going to fill up, so grab a spot while you can.
What are your favorite Music Hack Day Hacks?
Posted by Paul in code, events, hacking, music hack day on September 10, 2013
Photo by Thomas Bonte
In a couple of weeks I’m heading out to Chicago to give a talk at the Chicago Music Summit about Music Hacking at Music Hack Days. I’ll have an hour to talk about hack days and show off lots of demos. Naturally, I’d like to highlight all the best hacks. However, given that there have been over 30 music hack days, remembering the best of the 2000+ hacks is going to be a challenge. I’m hoping you can help me remember the best hacks, either by adding a comment to this post or just tweeting with #bestmusichack. I prefer hacks that I can demo directly via the web or that have been captured on video. To get things started here are some of the most notable hacks that I can recall.
Whimsical Hacks
Hardware Hacks
Music Exploration and Discovery Hacks
Party playlisting
Of the many party playlisting hacks that have been created, which one is the best?
Hacks that have been turned into businesses
- The Arpeggionome
- Calvin Harris – 18 months – Dance to unlock the new album
Music Remixing Hacks
Performance art
No need to be shy about suggesting your own hacks. As you can see, I have no qualms about adding my own hacks (Bonhamizer, Infinite Jukebox and Boil The Frog) to the list.
I anticipate your recommendations. Thanks in advance for your help!
Which music services are growing, which are shrinking
Here’s a quick tour of google trends output for a number of music services with an eye for identifying which are growing and which are shrinking. Google trends tracks search interest. The number 100 represents the peak search interest in these graphs.
Updated (1) (2) (3) – added a number of new charts. Updated (4) – added a summary list
iTunes – ITunes looks relatively flat since 2010. Perhaps things will change with their Pandora competitor to be launched this month.
last.fm – Peaked in 2009, has now fallen back to where it was in 2006. The golden age of last.fm is over, sad to say.
Spotify – steady growth since launch in 2009
Pandora – steady growth since 2006. Perhaps leveling off.
Rhapsody – slow but steady shrinking interest
Rdio – steady growth since 2011 launch, steep growth in the last year
Deezer – steady shrinkage since 2009
Grooveshark – peaked in 2012, now shrinking
siriusxm – strong growth since 2011
iheartradio – strong growth since 2011
Google Music – slow steady growth
Slacker – slight decline in interest since its peak in 2009
Soundcloud – strong increase since 2009
Youtube – Youtube has always been one of the most popular destinations for music listeners
Songza – After a pivot in 2011, very strong growth
8tracks – strong growth since 2011
Bandcamp
Turntable – after the initial buzz, interest in turntable has declined dramatically.
Mixcloud – strong steady growth since 2009
MOG – peaked in 2012
Jango – peaked in January of this year, but have since dropped to 2010 interest levels
Playlist.com – peaked in 2009, now at its lowest interest since 2007.
soundhound – slightly off from its 2012 peak interest.
shazam – strong steady, rising interest
Beatport – holding steady at 2009 levels
Muve – steady growth since 2011
The Hype Machine – six years of decline
ex.fm – a jagged two year climb
Amazon MP3 – growing until 2011, when it flattens out, and perhaps drops a bit.
Walmart Music – at its lowest point ever
Yahoo Music – Once the biggest destination on the web, now at its lowest point.
Myspace Music – steady decline until there’s nothing left
Facebook Music – the only service where the downward trend started before the product was announced.
Twitter Music – perhaps the strangest graph at all. Lots of excitement at launch and then, almost instantly … meh.
Zune – bursts of activity with every Zune update, but a steady decline to irrelevance.
xbox music – modest decline since the October 2012 release, but too early to tell.
Radionomy – I’d never heard of them before, but they are gaining interest, especially in France.
Sony’s Music Unlimited – growing since 2010
Radio.com – Waning interest since 2009
Of course, these search trends are not the same as having an actual measure of activity. Millions of people play music on Spotify or iTunes every day without performing a search. However, until we can get raw user numbers from every music service, this is probably about the closest we can get to understanding which services are growing and which are shrinking.
Leave a comment if you think there are some music listening services that I’ve missed that I should include.
Thirty shades of White Christmas
There are over 30 albums called White Christmas that feature Bing Crosby. All different. Different album art. Different song lists. Different artist collaborations. Music metadata is hard.
What is a Music Hack Day?
With 3 new Music Hack Days announced this week, it might be time for you to check out what goes on at a Music Hack Day. Here are some videos that give a taste of what it’s like:
Music Hack Day Paris 2013
Music Hack Day Sydney 2012**
Music Hack Day 2012 Barcelona
Music Hack Day NYC 2011
For more info on what a Music Hack Day is like read: What happens at a Music Hack Day. I hope to see you all at one of the upcoming events.
**It is strange how a non-hacker made it onto the thumbnail for the Sydney video. Dude, It’s Sydney Australia, not Sydney Lawrence ;).
Upcoming Music Hack Days – Chicago, Bologna and NYC
Posted by Paul in events, hacking, Music, The Echo Nest on September 3, 2013
Photo by Thomas Bonte
Fall is traditional Music Hack Day season, and 2013 is shaping up to be the strongest yet. Three Music Hack Days have just been announced:
- Chicago – September 21st and 22nd – this will be the first ever Music Hack Day in Chicago.
- Bologna – October 5th and 6th – in collaboration with roBOt Festival 2013. The first Music Hack Day in Italy.
- New York – October 18th and 19th – being held in Spotify’s nifty new offices.
There will no doubt be more hack days before the end of the year including the traditional Boston and London events. You can check out the full schedule and sign up to be notified whenever at a new Music Hack Day is announced at MusicHackDay.org.
Music Hack Day is an international 24-hour event where programmers, designers and artists come together to conceptualize, build and demo the future of music. Software, hardware, mobile, web, instruments, art – anything goes as long as it’s music related.
Github repositories of music tech
There are a lot of music tech companies working to create new ways for people to engage with music. Lots of these companies are also giving back to the world by making their source code available. Here are the top music tech companies who have made significant open source contributions (in alphabetical order). Criteria to be on this list: The organization must be primarily a music company (sorry, google and twitter) that has participated in a Music Hack Day and must have at least three 10-star or more github projects. If I’ve missed anyone, please let me know.
Last.fm – 23 public repos. Top Projects:
- lastfm-deskiop – 166 stars – The official Last.fm desktop application suite
- Fingerprinter – 160 stars – the official repository for the last.fm fingerprint library.
- libmoost – 122 stars – Last.fm’s collection of C++ utility libraries
Rdio – 31 public repos. Top projects:
- Vernacular – 95 stars – a localization tool for developers. It currently is focused on providing a unified localization system for MonoTouch, Mono for Android, and Windows Phone.
- Bujagali – 90 stars – Bujagali is a flexible template system that is a thin layer on top of JavaScript which makes it easier to write HTML (or any templated text) using JavaScript
- rdio-simple – 83 stars – a set of simple clients libraries for Rdio’s web API.
SongKick – 52 public repos – Top Projects
- oauth2-provider – 334 stars – Simple OAuth 2.0 provider toolkit
- transport – 40 stars – A transport layer abstraction for talking to service APIs
- aspec – 10 stars – a testing language for API external surfaces.
SoundCloud – 123 public repos – Top projects:
- lhm – 438 stars – Online MySQL schema migrations
- soundcloud-custom-player – 395 stars – SoundCloud Custom Player as a jQuery plugin
- areweplayingyet – 134 stars – html5 audio benchmarks
Spotify – 28 public repos – Top projects:
- luigi – 682 stars – Luigi is a Python module that helps you build complex pipelines of batch jobs. It handles dependency resolution, workflow management, visualization etc. It also comes with Hadoop support built in.
- cocoalibspotify – 425 stars – A Cocoa wrapper for libpotify
- sparkey – 161 stars – Sparkey is a simple constant key/value storage library.
The Echo Nest – 42 public repos. Top Projects:
- Echoprint-codegen – 323 stars – Echoprint is an open source music fingerprint and resolving framework powered by the The Echo Nest.
- pyechonest – 258 stars – Pyechonest is an open source Python library for the Echo Nest API. With Pyechonest you have Python access to the entire set of API methods.
- Echoprint-server – 212 stars – the server component for Echoprint – an open source music fingerprint and resolving framework powered by the The Echo Nest.
Misc:
A few companies / organizations have only one frequently starred repos, but since it is their entire source code, it seems worth mentioning.
- MuseScore – 135 stars – MuseScore is a open source and free music notation software
- Tomahawk-player – 445 stars – Tomahawk, the social music player app
Criteria to be on this list: The organization must be primarily a music company (sorry, google and twitter) that has participated in a Music Hack Day and must have at least three 10-star or more github projects. If I’ve missed anyone, please let me know.
Are these the angriest tracks on the web?
I built a playlist of songs that most frequently appear in playlists with the words angry or mad with the Smart Playlist Builder. These are arguably some of the angriest tracks on the web.
http://www.rdio.com/people/plamere/playlists/5779446/Top_angry_songs_created_with_SPB/
It is interesting to compare these angry tracks to the top tracks tagged with angry at Last.fm.
I can’t decide whether the list derived from angry playlists is better or worse than the list driven by social tags. I’d love to hear your opinion. Take a look at these two lists and tell me which list is a better list of angry tracks and why.
yep, this is totally unscientific poll, but I’m still interested in what you think.
Top cover songs
I’ve always been a big fan of cover songs. They provide a great way to experience old music in a new way. They can help you discover a new artist or a new genre – by combining the familiar with the novel. To build the ultimate cover song playlist I used the Smart Playlist Builder to create a playlist of covers that most frequently appear in cover songs playlists. These are the essential covers. Have a listen:
http://www.rdio.com/people/plamere/playlists/5775766/Top_covers_songs_via_SPB/
You can read more about the Smart Playlist Builder and create your own wisdom-of-the-crowds playlists.
Using the wisdom of the crowds to build better playlists
At music sites like Rdio and Spotify, music fans have been creating and sharing music playlists for years. Sometimes these playlists are carefully crafted sets of songs for particular contexts like gaming or sleep and sometimes they are just random collections of songs. If I am looking for music for a particular context, it is easy to just search for a playlist that matches that context. For instance, if I am going on roadtrip there are hundreds of roadtrip playlists on Rdio for me to chose from. Similarly, if I am going for a run, there’s no shortage of running playlists to chose from. However, if I am going for a run, I will need to pick one of those hundreds of playlists, and I don’t really know if the one I pick is going to be of the carefully crafted variety or if it was thrown together haphazardly, leaving me with a lousy playlist for my run. Thus I have a problem – What is the best way to pick a playlist for a particular context?
Naturally, we can solve this problem with data. We can take a wisdom of the crowds approach to solving this problem. To create a running playlist, instead of relying on a single person to create the playlist, we can enlist the collective opinion of everyone who has ever created a running playlist to create a better list.
I’ve built a web app to do just this. It lets you search through Rdio playlists for keywords. It will then aggregate all of the songs in the matching playlists and surface up the songs that appear in the most playlists. So if Kanye West’s Stronger appears in more running playlists than any other song, it will appear first in the resulting playlist. Thus songs, that the collective agree are good songs for running get pushed to the top of the list. It’s a simple idea that works quite well. Here are some example playlists created with this approach:
Best Running Songs
http://www.rdio.com/people/plamere/playlists/5773579/Top_best_running_songs_via_SPB/
Coding
http://www.rdio.com/people/plamere/playlists/5773559/Top_coding_songs_via_SPB/
Sad Love Songs
http://www.rdio.com/people/plamere/playlists/5773508/Top_sad_love_songs_songs_via_SPB/
Chillout
http://www.rdio.com/people/plamere/playlists/5773867/Top_chillout_songs_via_SPB/
Date Night
http://www.rdio.com/people/plamere/playlists/5773474/Top_date_night_songs_via_SPB/
Sexy Time
http://www.rdio.com/people/plamere/playlists/5773535/Top_sexytime_songs_via_SPB/
This wisdom of the crowds approach to playlisting isn’t limited to contexts like running or coding, you can also use it to give you an introduction to a genre or artist as well.
Country
http://www.rdio.com/people/plamere/playlists/5773544/Top_country_songs_via_SPB/
Post Rock
http://www.rdio.com/people/plamere/playlists/5773642/Top_post_rock_songs_via_SPB/
Weezer
http://www.rdio.com/people/plamere/playlists/5773606/Top_weezer_songs_via_SPB/
The Smart Playlist Builder
The app that builds these nifty playlists is called The Smart Playlist Builder. You type in a few keywords and it will search Rdio for all the matching playlists. It will show you the matching playlists, giving you a chance to refine your query. You can search for words, phrases and you can exclude terms as well. The query sad “love songs” -country will search for playlists with the word sad, and the phrase love songs in the title, but will exclude any that have the word country.
When you are happy with your query you can aggregate the tracks from the matching playlists. This will give you a list of the top 100 songs that appeared in the matching playlists.
If you are happy with the resulting playlist, you can save it to Rdio, where you can do all the fine tuning of the playlist such as re-ordering, adding and deleting songs.
The Smart Playlist Builder uses the really nifty Rdio API. The Rdio folks have done a fantastic job of giving developers access to their music and data. Well done Rdio team!
Go ahead and give The Smart Playlist Builder a try to see how the wisdom of the crowds can help you make playlists.
