Music Machinery

This weekend I was in Stockholm, participating in, and representing The Echo Nest at the Stockholm Music Hack Day held at Spotify HQ.  It was quite an impressive event.  Hundreds of hackers from all over Sweden and many others from all around the world joined together for 24 hours of hard core music hacking.  Spotify did an excellent job hosting the event.  The space was ideal for hacking – rock solid wifi with lots of bandwidth,  an endless supply of caffeinated beverages, comfortable seating, and great audio/visual facilities for demos.

(photos by johncb1973)

There were a whole lot of music tech companies there too, showing off their technology. Such as:

Spotify The Echo Nest ShareMyPlaylists Songkick Open EMI

 SoundCloud Soundrop Musixmatch DeezerRdioGracenote

Universal MusicMusicmetric

Some hackers built their own musical instruments.

There were over 60 hacks demonstrated in a 3 hour period. Kudos to Andrew to keeping things moving along. There was very little demo fail – thanks to the good A/V and support from Andrew and his team.

While each team gave their demo, 100s of fellow hackers and guests watched, laughed, cried and celebrated the wonder of the music hacks.

There were all kinds of hacks:  interactive games, music exploration and discovery, playlisting, remixing, sequencing.  The hacks were incredibly creative, and despite the demo session being 3 hours long, the time just flew by.  Be sure to check out the entire list of hacks.

We got to listen to much good music,  from Oscar’s Flamenco guitar to creative remixing of the Blue Note Catalog.

I was quite pleased to see the number of hacks that took advantage of Echo Nest data to remix music.  All of them were quite unique and clever uses of our API.

Stealing Feeling was one of my favorites of the Remix apps. They use the Echo Nest API to extract the rhythmic feeling of a song and used it to turn the output of a sterile drum machine beat into a living, breathing, human sounding rhythm.

My own demo was called Going Undercover.  I used cover song data from SecondHandSongs to make music discovery playlists.

There were lots of Echo Nest based hacks.  We originally planned to give out 2 prizes, but after seeing so many extremely high quality Echo Nest hacks  we doubled the number of iPads we were giving out.  The Echo Nest prize winners are:

The Sampler formerly known as Magnum Infinitity – TSFKAMI, is a musical instrument which creates patches from any sound or music you supply to it. Specify any directory with music or sounds on your hard drive and the contents will be uploaded to the EchoNest, which scans each file for short snippets with a pure(ish) pitch. The soundfiles are then chopped up and the desired snippets sorted by musical note and timbre and delivered to the sampler for that velvety smooth sounding goodness. https://www.hackerleague.org/hackathons/music-hack-day-stockholm-13/hacks/the-sampler-formerly-known-as-magnum-infinity

Super Mutroid – A music/rhythm platform game with a Super Metroid theme. – Plays a song through Libspotify and downloads song data from EchoNest. Generates obstacles based on the beats in the song. – https://www.hackerleague.org/hackathons/music-hack-day-stockholm-13/hacks/super-mutroid

Pimp My Radio – A physical standalone radio that connects to a WiFi network and plays music from Spotify based on your daily moments (wakeup, relax, work out, romance, party ). The radio has a knob control for setting the situation you want and also an lcd screen for showing the lyrics of the current song in sync with the time. https://www.hackerleague.org/hackathons/music-hack-day-stockholm-13/hacks/pimp-my-radio

Stealing Feeling Based around a 16 step javascript sequencer which a user can program to run a drumkit generated in web audio, or to trig analog synths.Then, apply the swing from Aretha Franklin or Squarepusher on your song. https://www.hackerleague.org/hackathons/music-hack-day-stockholm-13/hacks/stealing-feeling

Other notable EN hacks

• Curadio – (another) physical radio with fancy playlists – https://www.hackerleague.org/hackathons/music-hack-day-stockholm-13/hacks/curadio
• Shutupcloud – filters soundcloud playlists to remove spoken word tracks (using speechiness)- https://www.hackerleague.org/hackathons/music-hack-day-stockholm-13/hacks/shutupcloud
• Discofy–MHD – light show synced to beats – https://www.hackerleague.org/hackathons/music-hack-day-stockholm-13/hacks/discofy-mhd

• Orly – used Whosampled rostta stone to make an in-spotify who-sampled explorer (this is a really neat app) – https://github.com/circuitflow/orly
• Blue Note Beat Builder – winner of the Open EMI prize – really cool! – Find classic break beats and jazz samples from the Blue Note catalog and create your own beat, or try to re-create another famous beat from scratch. –https://www.hackerleague.org/hackathons/music-hack-day-stockholm-13/hacks
• Dubthoven – remixing skrillex with strings https://www.hackerleague.org/hackathons/music-hack-day-stockholm-13/hacks/dubthoven

It was a fantastic weekend. Thanks to Andrew and the rest of the Spotify crew for hosting the event, and thanks to all the hackers who brought your passion for music and technology to the event and build some incredible stuff.

Special thanks to Johncb1973 who took most of these pictures.

The work of an Executive, International Music Hacker is never done.  This weekend I’ll be traveling to Cannes for the Midem Music Hack Day. Life is good.

This week, the usually excellent Hypebot published a post by Kyle Bylin called  Music Discovery: The Path to Digital Failure. In this post, Kyle takes issue with a recent Billboard article about how music discovery is one of the key areas in the new music business.  Kyle pulls no punches. He says “Music Discovery is a lie that is never going to come true”.  His argument is threefold:

(1) “Music discovery is a dead pool of music startups, where zero successes exist”

I’m not sure which world Kyle lives in, but it is not my world. I see music discovery success everywhere I look, from emerging startups like Discovr, Songza, Turntable.fm,  SpotOn, The Sixty One,  We Are Hunted, and many more, to more established companies such as The Hype Machine,  Shazam, Soundhound, Last.fm and Pandora.  There are companies like The Echo Nest (where I work), Rovi and Gracenote that supply data and tools for music discovery.   The biggest tech companies in the world: Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Apple, are all investing heavily in music discovery technology such as music recommendation and playlisting. Likewise, the growing music subscription services like Spotify, Rhapsody and Rdio are working hard to provide tools to make it easier for their listeners to explore and discover new music, recognizing that this is essential for subscriber retention.  Even the traditional music tastemakers – such as the music labels, MTV and broadcast radio increasingly rely on discovery technology to surface new, interesting music. Oh, and by the way, three of the largest exits in the digital music space are discovery-related: Last.fm ($280m), Gracenote ($260m) and Pandora (with a current market cap of 1.5bn).  I wouldn’t mind going for a swim in that dead pool.

There are hundreds of companies, big and small,  all around the world successfully improving the music discovery experience.   The success is quantifiable and real: more music sales, longer listening time, improved subscriber retention, more satisfied listeners.  Asserting that there are zero successes is just plain wrong.

(2) “Music discovery isn’t a problem, and it’s not a solution either. Music listeners don’t have trouble figuring out what to listen to; they simply don’t know what to listen to next. They have more than enough music, but not enough time to explore it.”

This is crazy time. First, Kyle says ‘Music discovery isn’t  a problem’ and then in the very next sentence he says that listeners ‘simply don’t know what to listen to  next’. The only way that this can make sense is for Kyle to have a very narrow understanding of what  music discovery is. I suspect that when Kyle says ‘music discovery’ he means ‘artist recommendation’, which is a very small part of the music discovery world.  Music discovery is so much more than just artist recommendation and a big part of music discovery is helping that listener decide what to listen to next.

(3) “Music discovery requires a lot of work; no service can do that work for you.”

So we went from “Music discovery isn’t a problem” to “Music discovery requires a lot of work“. Which is it? Certainly if it isn’t a problem then it shouldn’t require a lot of work. If I really don’t have trouble figuring out what to listen to why must I “set aside a few hours to sift through and listen to a lot of “bad” music“. Yes, music discovery can be hard. That is why so many people are trying to build tools to help you explore for and discover new music. That’s why Billboard suggests that  music discovery is one of the key areas in the new music business.   Today’s music listener is totally overwhelmed by the amount of music available.  Helping that listener sort through the 20 million songs that they have in their pocket to find something that they’d enjoy listening to next, perhaps something new, or perhaps an old favorite, will indeed be a key part of the new music business.  Music discovery is not “a lie” – it is real, it is a big part of today’s listening experience and will be an even bigger part of tomorrow’s listening experience.