Music Hack Day: "a Dungeons & Dragons conference for music geeks"

Hello, dear netaudio fans! Since I’m writing for a community of online music lovers, I figured it would be nice to start this column by mentioning one of the most awesome series of events that have been happening lately in this area, Music Hack Day. These events can be most aptly described as a kind of a marathon for geeks who enjoy hacking APIs from online music services like Last.fm, MySpace and SoundCloud.

The challenge is to build the most fantastic and unthinkable applications during a weekend. The focus is usually in web development for the “cloud” but sometimes you can run into very funny artistic hardware projects, like a drum machine made with an Arduino microcontroller.

Unbounded innovation in a hurry

Like with netlabels, the motto here seems to be that there’s no need for a big budget in order for the music industry to innovate . Admittedly, some or even most of these hacks won’t end up being used in a large-scale environment. But others can offer a glimpse of what’s ahead in terms of online music user’s experience. This is all possible because of the wonders of public APIs and other open source tools which lower the barriers to entry in the field.

It all started last July when SoundCloud’s UK manager Dave Haynes had the idea to organize a marathon for hackers with the aim to explore and build the next generation of music applications. The first Music Hack Day took place in London between the 11th and the 12th of July, right in the headquarters of British newspaper The Guardian. Overall, more than 200 persons and 10 companies participated.

One of the most amazing apps that emerged from that day was CitySounds, a page which lets you visually explore the last tunes uploaded to SoundCloud from some of the biggest cities in the world. Each place is identified by an image from Flickr.

After that summer weekend in London, there was another Music Hack Day in Berlin (18th – 20th September) and another one in Amsterdam (October 21st). This weekend it crossed the Pond and landed on Boston. Or, more precisely, at the Microsoft New England Research & Development Center. If you want to get a small idea of what happened there, the quickest way to do it is by searching for the #musichackd ay hashtag on Twitter. Indie Music Tech published a list with all the nearly 40 projects that were submitted.

Boston API Party

Web 2.0 is surrounded with hype and music is not an exception. Judging by a quick look through these projects, you can get the feeling that Playdar is going to be The Next Big Thing. All in all there were five apps based on it. It can be difficult to get what Playdar means and does if I only tell you that it’s a “music content resolver service” developed by Last.fm’s co-founder Richard Jones with the help of the creator of the XSPF music playlist format Lucas Gonze. But the plainest and most simple way to understand its aim is to say that it helps online services to automatically find and play all the tracks users already have on their computers and devices.

Playdar can drastically reduce the costs of operating a streaming platform in terms of royalties charged by majors and collecting societies. These costs are actually crushing legal sites like Imeem (which was recently bought by MySpace). This was also the reason why in April Last.fm was forced to start charging its users outside of the US, UK and Germany.

That’s why some developers are already starting to build plug-ins that connect online music services APIs with Playdar. On the other hand, users which have several devices spread in lots of different places can also benefit because Playdar helps them to find their songs wherever they’re stored. There are already installers for Windows and Mac that help you make use of it. Some examples of Playdar applications developed during this last Music Hack Day were playdarTunes, which allows you to play your iTunes music inside the browser even outside of a local network, and Sonar, directed to owners of Sonos multi-room music systems. This app searches the user’s Twitter friends or Last.fm feeds for music recommendations and allows him to play the tracks anywhere in the house.

Also very noticeable was the use of Echo Nest set of APIs. Echonest was founded by two MIT Media Lab PhD students and during the last year it has been striking deals with music startups such as MOG and Spotify to power their subscriptions with its recommendation engine. This is just to show that, far from being a gathering of hobbyists, Music Hack Day is also an opportunity to make informal ties with the makers and breakers of the new music business.

Besides lots of sessions involving furious music coding, participants were also able to attend 25 minute workshops where they could learn the APIs’ basics from the participant companies as well as others more to do with hands-on DIY hardware like Circuit Bending.

For those who needed guidance on how to navigate the convulsed waves of the online music there were also panels with some luminaries from the area like Anthony Volodkin from Hype Machine (do read his summary of the event), Derek Sivers (founder of CDBaby), LimeWire’s VP Jason Herskowitz on the role of music discovery, the future of music and how to start a music business.

To sum it up: if you’re a web developer with a passion for music be sure to look out for this sort of “Dungeons & Dragons conference for music geeks” (to copy the expression used by Herskowitz’s wife to describe Music Hack Day to friends and family) in a city near you. The best way to put it is that this is what happens in the music tech sphere when you expel the execs and lawyers who are much to blame for the present crisis of the record business and leave only coders and hackers. These guys have all but their ingenuity as a constraint.