7digital Blog

As our CEO, Ben Drury, is on the cover of the Mobile Marketing Magazine this month, we thought it was a good time to talk about mobile apps. The last few weeks have seen a surge of music focused apps, covering everything from viewing to videos and photos of One Direction through augmented reality, to accessing exclusive content from The XX. One even helps those listeners who are trying to get that little bit fitter before Christmas descends.

Terms like ‘innovation’ and ‘immersive experience’ are thrown around constantly. While we’re not huge fans of clichés, we are big fans of the concepts behind them.

Our favourite has been the 18 Months app from Calvin Harris, which provides Android and iOS users with the entire 18 Months album for free – but with a catch. You have to keep dancing if you want to hear the music. Once you stop dancing (or at least stop moving) so does the music, unless you fork out some cash for it. The idea is to get those fans who’ve brought a few singles to complete their album – and what better motivation to buy a dance album than to get people dancing. Tongue-in-cheek as it might be, it does address the decline in physical albums compared to growth digital album sales. It won’t work for everyone of course, but it’s a darn good idea.

The explosion of connected devices (which could be your TV, games console, or even a fridge if you fancy) is creating a previously unheard of choice for listening to your favourite artists and bands.

This is naturally good news for music fans, but it should be filling the hearts of developers and labels with joy too. Labels can do anything from encourage more track downloads to complete the digital album of a particular artist, to develop all new marketing and revenue streams. And to do this, they’ll need developers to create a new app, who’ll in turn bring in some cash for themselves.

There’s still plenty of room for good old fashioned tracks and albums, but it’s very encouraging to see the industry embracing some of the new opportunities and pushing app development forward.

The Music Hack Day held in Boston’s MIT Strata Center was one of the biggest ever with close to 65 hacks and a packed room of people from all over the map. When polled, the crowd makeup was about 25% MIT students and the rest a combination of the usual suspects and others that were new to the scene. The MIT student presence seemed to shine as the hackers entered the room to set up with a higher than average number of hardware hacks and very few technical difficulties in the demos. A telling exchange overheard was when the AV guy on hand was told apologetically about some complicated demo connection needed and responded, “this is MIT man, I have set up for robot competitions and stuff, there is not a lot that can surprise me”.

The following week-end Music Hack Day moved across the pond over to UK, Hosted at Facebook’s London offices hackers from all over Europe have built over 40 music hacks.

The Echo Nest’s API was the star of both shows and used in an overwhelming series of genius mashup and remix projects including a number worthy of a whole hour presentation rather than the 5 minutes allowed for demos.

Out of the many

There were too many amazingly creative hacks done, however we were particularly impressed with the following:

Instant Karaoke – This was our favorite hack and they made a great use of 7digital’s search and streaming API functionality.

Description: We’re taking karaoke to the next level with a multi-player game that allows you to do karaoke for ~any~ song. One player presses a button when a word is said, the other one sings along.

Remix Of The Century – Winner of the 7digital prize in London

Description: We’ve taken every number 1 from the Billboard charts since 1890, and made an interactive remix. The end result is eleven minutes of (mostly) beat-matched automated remixing from 1890 to 2012.

Animal Critic – You can’t beat cute animals for viral scalability, winner of a Gracenote prize.

Description: Generated one-sentence reviews of tracks by the most elite reviewers of the animal kingdom. Using NLP techniques to parse reviews from Rolling Stone and Pitchfork, and generate brand new sentences!

Tomahawk Facebook Connections – Good concept, clean demo.

Description: Tomahawk already lets you connect to peers over XMPP, ZeroConf, and Twitter. Now, you can easily connect to your Facebook friends to share and stream music, playlists, and more.

Music: The Gathering – Served a practical use and pulled off a difficult demo with few slip ups, winner of a Rdio prize.

Description: A service that manages a running playlist based on the physical proximity of users to a target wireless network. Once a recognized mobile phone joins the network, an Rdio playlist updates with music relevant to that device’s owner. This ensures that everyone’s music is represented equally at any social gathering.

Stash.fm – Very interesting concept, good implementation of ideas with lots of room to grow!

Description: The world’s first “Mobile Music Bookmarking App”

High Five Hero – Very cute demo and looked like a lot of fun.

Description: We used Makey Makey to turn our secret handshake into our own personal soundtrack.

Johnny Cash Has Been Everywhere (Man)! – This entertaining hack cheered up the demo sessions crowd in London

Description: Essentially a Google Maps music video, dropping pins on a map of America in sync with Johnny Cash bragging about all the places he’s been.

Uses the MusixMatch API to get timestamped lyrics , look for place names and reverse geocode using Google Maps API, then synchronises the map plots while playing the song using the Toma.HK player.

and finally our very own hack:

Bad Cover Version Quiz – we got more than 30 players from the audience play simultaneously our multi-player quiz game

Description: The greatest bands in the world… and their sound-alikes. Can you tell them apart?

Uses The Echo Nest API to find hotttessst tracks by familiar artists (that are likely to have plenty of cover versions) then searches the 7digital Catalogue API to find the tributes and randomly picks between a cover and an original version

The Seattle Interactive Conference took place Oct, 29th-30th, bringing out all sectors in the digital and new media space including, entrepreneurs, technologists, advertisers, designers, entertainers, online business professionals and thinkers. Music is perhaps one of the most reaching and compelling catalysts for interactivity and we felt right at home discussing progress and innovation with this wonderful cross section of industries. Two of the panels that focused on music showed just how many debates persist and are in need of serious discussion around the innovation in music consumption and interactivity.

Who Owns The Music?

Our own Vickie Nauman sat on this panel to discuss intellectual property and the future of music consumption. She was joined by moderator, Ross Reynolds of KUOW and panellists, Rob Reid, Shirley Roberson of Hughes Media Law Group and Tony Kiewel, VP of A&R at Sub Pop Records.

They were asked if the concept of owning music matters anymore. Ross Reynolds discussed the popularity of the subscription streaming model highlighting the difference between the successes of Spotify over Rhapsody’s early entrance into the market 10 years ago. Although Tony Kiewel began to describe music as having two owners; the artist /label and the consumer, he was clear to point out that the stream means no ownership for the consumer. Vickie Nauman kept it simple by putting consumers in less of a divided situation between ownership vs. rental and into the basic need of “wanting music on their device,” and always taking the simplest option for getting it there when they can.

When asked whether licensing was getting better, Vickie comment that it certainly is where there is already a business model established. Truly innovative services that challenge these new ‘traditional’ models continue to have a hard time.

Is ownership, therefore, a historical concept? The panellists seemed to agree that ownership was not dead. Indie labels are selling more albums than they used to as an aggregate of digital and physical sales due to the power of consumer tastemaking and word of mouth in interactive media. When asked if there are winners or losers in the digital era of post-ownership, Ross Reynolds pointed out the lack of money aggregated through subscription services. Vickie’s repositioning of the debate came in again as she reinforced the importance of ‘access’ in both models to drive opportunity for new and innovative services that will continue to convert consumers and widen the debate.

Digital Music – Revolution or Rebellion?

This panel aimed to discuss the way artists in particular deal with technology. Or, more specifically as described in the intro, whether “rebelling against technology makes music more authentic or if perhaps technology is the key to the music revolution.”

These powerful concepts and strong words were put up for discussion with panellists, Chris Kornelis of Seattle Weekly, Kyla Fairchild of Nodepression.com, Luca Sacchetti of RockStar Motel, Laurel Starns of LSS Mgmt / Dilettante and Josh Rosenfeld of Barsuk Records.

Laurel Starns described the ways in which an artist can do it all themselves and therefore bypass the traditional record label. All the way from recording to finding a team and fundraising, there is a tool for that according to her. However, each artist has to find their way. She suggested that perhaps urban acts or pop stars are better served by a label. Meanwhile, from Josh Rosenfeld from Barsuk positioned that the both the quantity and quality of new artists submitted for deals has increased and urged people to remember that music releases aren’t just competing with other music but also, games, video, TV and social media. It is a time of gluttony for content.

How do we deal with all this content? Kyla, brought up the services that show peer or crowd sourced suggestion as an important shift away from the traditional music critic or journalist. Meanwhile, Luca Sacchetti urged artists to find an ‘ecosystem’ to support them through both distribution set up and touring.

The group was back and forth about the models for consumption. The general sentiment is that streaming provides such small revenue for artists but it is the looming model going forward so it makes sense to engage. Overall, it is obvious that technology is changing the way artists work and the tools they have access to, however, is it really changing the art form or creating a real divide? Not an easy topic for any strong conclusions but a great discussion around what is happening for artists as they face this changing reality.

CMJ brought the industry to New York, with a week of panels, parties, and a huge list of up and coming talent playing their hearts out each night throughout the city. NYU’s Kimmel Center was the hub of it all where the artists and industry converge to pick up badges and chat about their overburdened schedules for the week.

The buzz on artists in town was hard to keep track of even for the super savviest of music followers. For those interested in keeping up on who is being talked about, our friends at Music Metric put together some very cool stats to show the buzz on bands at CMJ.

No Code No Problem; Anatomy of the API

7digital’s Marketing Manager for North America, Anna Siegel sat on the week’s first panel speaking to a packed room of industry folks, students and entrepreneurs engaged in the start up space. She was joined by Darryl Ballantyne, CEO of LyricFind, Jeff Bronikowski, VP of Corporate Partnerships for The Echo Nest and Andrew Mager, Hacker Advocate for Spotify on a panel moderated by Bill Wilson of digitalmusic.org.

The panelists admitted to the group that the name was a little misleading, and that although APIs can reduce the amount of friction for start ups looking to enter the digital music space, there is no real yellow brick road to success. Furthermore, for a number of these API advocates – and especially the case for 7digital – the offering is deeper than the ‘code’ alone but woven into a complex and extremely valuable library of content rights and management. 7digital’s 22 million tracks, and LyricFind’s vast database of the world’s song lyrics came from and continues to require a very difficult and challenging relationship with the various rights holders. As the panel continued to stress the difficulty of working with these rights, the complexity of the operational procedures was associated mainly with the metadata and ingestion processes. APIs take the complexity out of that side of the business, giving a sandbox or set of tools to those looking to create and innovate.

Questions from the audience showed both a heightened level of understanding around the use of API’s and encouraged the panelists towards discussing practicalities and implementation strategies. How do you get developers to engage with an API? What are some of the other main challenges around financial models in API usage? Although APIs are still entrenched in the sometimes elusive world of tech, they seem to be increasingly more commonly understood and easier to explain.

The companies represented by this group of panelists provides a potential API user with endless application ideas and business models to pursue. Innovation with APIs is in a sense the turn-key for so many; thinking seriously about product and users are therefore being left in the hands of the start ups to stress over. This leaves the common business development tasks to simply understanding the terms and conditions of the API you are using and the investment needed for the business model one is pursuing.

7digital Celebrates CMJ and Company Growth with Digital Dumbo and MailChimp

At the end of the very busy work week, the 7digital crew kicked up its heels at their very first New York mixer organized by Digital Dumbo and co-sponsored by MailChimp. 7digital’s annual update event held the previous day in London gave the group cause for celebration and brought together an eclectic and inspiring group of partners from label folks and lawyers to digital start ups and lifestyle brands. Thanks to all who came along to help us celebrate our news and a major thank you to Digital Dumbo and MailChimp for being such great co-hosts.

Photos of the event can be found here. Hope to see you at the next one!

Vickie Nauman, President of 7digital North America welcomes the event guests.

Mitch Rubin and Cindy Charles

Jeff Clyburn (Nat Geo Music) and Anna Siegel (7digital)

Jay Hershkowitz (Official.FM) and Gregory Mead (Music Metric)

Kaitlin Villanova (Digital Dumbo), Vickie Nauman (7digital) and Andrew Zarick (Digital Dumbo)

Happy CMJ attendees unite