As you may, or may not, know, music is not our only passion here at 7digital, oh no; music is just one of the many things that inspires us to create. Psychology, architecture, design and sociology are just a few things we like to indulge in. From the very inception of 7digital, inhibitions were abandoned and we wholeheartedly committed ourselves to a long (and, at times, rollercoaster) love affair with the ever-developing, ever-commodifying world of technology. Every year we expand our vision, (though never losing sight of our grassroots beginnings), learning more about our own experiences of music, our ideas and, crucially, the ways in which we can truly realise these aspirations. So, you’re wondering, what’s this all about?

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Last week we unveiled the expansion of our digital music services into new international territories in South Africa, Asia and South America, news that cemented an auspicious start to the year and marked a true milestone…

The expansion of our platform to include new worldwide destinations is a natural step for us in extending an ever-widening global reach for our open digital content.  We have acquired digital music licensing agreements with major and numerous independent labels in India, Brazil, Argentina, Colombia and South Africa, meaning a total footprint of 42 countries for our platform. Most people in the industry are aware that international music licensing is no light task. Before we reach for our champagne glasses it is important to take a minute to acknowledge that acquiring licensing agreements for new territories is really only half of the battle. The work to manage new massive catalogues, engage with new markets and the ongoing maintenance of new relationships in four new territories is admittedly a challenge. As our platform approach enables us to reduce the complexity for others looking to create digital music services, this challenge is right up our alley. It is great to see our teams come together to make this happen, and further reinforce our leadership position with the broadest reach of digital music rights globally.

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Music technologists had all eyes on San Francisco for the first half of this week. The annual Music Hack Day SF kicked off on February 16th at the Tokbox headquarters in San Francisco. The event encourages developers and technologists to “come build the future of music” for two days using an increasingly advanced toolbox of APIs.

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Only two months into 2013 and we are thrilled to announce another great 7digital partnership. Our ethos here is, and has always been, bolstered by the notion that music is something that, above all, we must interact with and experience in the broader sense of the word. Rather pertinent to this notion, then, is a project that we are extremely excited to unveil. It is a partnership with Seattle’s music, sci-fi and pop-culture devotees at the EMP Museum: introducing “On The Wall”. Sound intriguing, right?

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We’re just back from Midem 2013, where the music industry’s finest kick the year off in style at various Cannes hotel bars and restaurants, with the occasional visit to the conference centre when it can’t be avoided.

Over the last few years we’ve seen more and more tech companies attending, and it’s encouraging seeing the focus on developers and tech grow even more in 2013.

API’s were everywhere this year!  We met with Open EMI’s Neil Tinegate, and got some insight into how that programme is working for developers and the label, and we sat in on the Midemlab competition and watched a panel of judges pull apart Apps and ideas from start-ups.  It was also rewarding to meet a whole host of developers who have started using the 7digital API and to see their apps in action.

At the other end of the spectrum, another app built on our API is the Samsung Music Hub and it was also great to hear TJ Kang (SVP Media Services, Samsung Electronics) discuss Music Hub, at length, in a panel session with Olivia Solon (Associate Editor of Wired) and Paul Mascarenas (CTO of US car giant Ford).

And to prove that we don’t only ‘talk the talk’ we got our hands dirty at the 3rd annual Midem Hack Day, which saw developers from all over the world get together for a weekend to turn ideas around music and technology into working prototypes. The outcome was impressive as usual, with applications ranging from music creation and audio manipulation, (e.g. Girl Talk in a Box, Music Collective or LeapMix), through artist support (e.g. SoundCard or Ephemeral Playback) to music consumption and just plain fun (e.g. VidSwappr or [EXPLICIT] Feedback)

Our own hack resulted in RadioMe, a radio app powered by the 7digital streaming API linked to last.fm and This Is My Jam that lets users run their own personalized radio station. Give it a try and let us know what you think! You can check out the full list of hacks created over the week-end here.

Our week culminated with the exciting BlackBerry 10 six city simultaneous launch which we attended in London and NYC.   The BlackBerry 10 devices boast fast browsers, new features, smart cameras and, unlike previous BlackBerry models, enter the market primed with a large application library… and an amazing music service powered by none other than 7digital!   We’ve been playing with the two new phone models and we love them already.

That’s our wrap for the week… now where are those Friday beers??

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

A few weeks ago we attended Music Hack Day Sydney. We’ve been to music hack days in the past, but this one felt a bit special given that it was Australia’s first ever Music Hack Day. And, that we had (soft) launched our Australian store.

For the uninitiated, Music Hack Day is a series of events that bring together developers and hardware tinkerers to build and present, music-related “hacks” over a single weekend. There were a wide range of attendees from mobile developers and visual designers to analog synth tweakers and audio engineers, many who went on hacking through the night without any sleep.

It is about having the space, opportunity and talent combined to create something with music and tech, without any commercial agendas or constraints. In the short space of 24 hours participants have to team up, come up with an idea, and build a working prototype to show to the group.

The Filter Squad, makers of the Discovr apps, did a fantastic job of hosting the event at Red Bull’s Sydney headquarters. With over 50 eager hackers and sponsors, stocked with what seemed like an endless supply of Red Bull, beer and pizza, it was clear from the start that this was going to be good.

We were really impressed by the quality of hacks produced over the weekend. Here are a few highlights:

InstaSound

Let’s vinyl and CD shoppers scan album cover art for a quick way to listen to the album before buying it in-store.

Wish You Were Here

A simple web app that let’s you listen to album versions of the songs played in a gig that you’re missing in real-time, as they are played live. It uses the 7digital API for streaming and we thought it was a neat idea.

Soundtrack Of You

What your parents were likely listening to when you were conceived.

Ivy

Like Instapaper for Music. Ivy is web app that let’s you bookmark music from YouTube and blog posts to add to a playlist. Your friends are also able to listen and contribute to the same playlist.

TokStar

TokStar is a virtual karaoke room built using the TokBox and 7digital APIs. Choose your song, enter your name, enable your camera and microphone, wait your turn, and you’re up and running on its virtual stage, singing your heart out for the voting pleasure of other visitors to the site.

Through inviting progressive, cross-industry professionals, academics, musicians and Berklee students, the Rethink Music Conference in Boston highlighted the friction and progress of our current industry climate into two days of high-level discussions. For tensions and concerns surrounding artist development and marketing, global licensing and the future of the music business there needs to be various forums like this and we were very happy to be a part of it. Keynote speaker and marketing guru Seth Godin started the conference with a compelling and inspiring look at the music business’ rise to ubiquity out of what was historically a culture of scarcity. He offered enlightening but easily graspable advice to the general crowd to start “marketing to the weird” and pushed for a focus on “finding your tribe” for an alternative look at success in the mass market. Although his speech was directed towards musicians it was clearly ‘rethinking’ the culture of the industry as a whole and provided a great start to the discussions. Other interesting conversations came from those looking forward to the Musical Ecosystem in 2015, GZA on Staying Relevant and the group Finding a Future in the Clouds.

Hackers’ Weekend

Prior to the two days of panels, The Hackers’ Weekend invited the developer community to take center stage to present their own ‘rethinking’ of music applications. At the end of 24 hours of intense coding on various music companies’ APIs, these young talents come up with a number of great ideas mainly focused around playlists, lyrics and social engagement. The winning hacks were: Kinect Bomba – where dancing in front of a Kinect controls the music, The Byrds and The Bee Gees – allowing a playful application that highlights songs popular at the time of conception and Concert Playlist Generator – helping live music fans easily listen to tracks on Spotify from upcoming gigs tracked through Songkick – perfect for pre-concert listening. 7digital was partial to the application Hiptapes, a music marketing app that allows artists to create a unique QR code to link to dynamic content for concert calendar and artist merch. We loved what this does for artists in the increasingly important DIY marketing landscape and the possibilities for fan activity with numerous options of engagement. We awarded the Hiptapes developers with a discount off our commercial API licence to help them get this off the ground should they chose to turn it into a real business. Here’s to forward thinking innovation!

Licensing Challenges in a Global Community

While music licensing can easily be a cure for insomnia, this post-lunch panel discussion on the topic managed to keep everyone’s attention focused on friction points, challenges and solutions across publishing, data, and settlement to content rights holders. Everyone agreed that a fair and equitable payment for intellectual property is the end goal, but there were many perspectives on which problems could and could not easily be solved. The panel included Richard Conlon, Senior Vice President Corporate Strategy, Communications & New Media at BMI, Steven Masur, Senior Partner at Masur Law, Cathy Merenda, Vice President of Music Publishing for Twentieth Century Fox, Vickie Nauman, President, North America for 7digital, Philippe Perreaux Founder of Rightsform and Rightsclearing, Jay Rosenthal, Senior Vice President & General Counsel for the National Music Publishers’ Association, and was moderated by Don Gorder, Chair and Founder of the Music Business / Management Department at Berklee College of Music.

After agreeing that the main licensing snarls revolve around data management, lack of resource and cross-border rights, all of the panelists spoke candidly about the extremely difficult realities of these problems. Jay Rosenthal noted that publishers seek faster payout and more transparency from labels, leading Steve Nasur to explain that the labels often have unfinished deals due to lack of resource. Cathy Merenda recalled returning a Fox check for a Beatles record they didn’t own the rights to and their dependence on intermediaries, and Richard Conlon echoed concerns of doing business in various regulatory environments and across borders in an increasingly globalised world. Our own Vickie Nauman commented that high-complexity/low-margin business affects the viability of new music services, explaining how many “get stuck in the tar-pit of licensing.” She went on to explain how 7digital works as both a licensor and licensee allowing new services and start-ups more ramp up time for their projects while admitting that 7digital doesn’t really eliminate the complexity, “we just take it on”.

Is there a global solution to all this tangled mess? Progress is being made – deals are being done, and thought-leaders continue to identify both problems and potential solutions. But there is still a lot of work ahead. In the meantime, companies passionate about music continue to plug away at licensing to keep up with the advancement of technology and consumer demand. It is reassuring that music is in high demand and should increase payments for rights holders including artists!