7digital Blog

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

Tags: API, CMJ, Music industry

This entry was posted on Friday, November 2nd, 2012 at 4:47 pm and is filed under API, Events, Tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.