7digital Blog

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!

On Thursday night we threw open our doors to the Shoreditch developer community and welcomed all and sundry in to the inaugural Devs in the ‘ditch event. Devs in the ‘ditch gives the chance for many developers working in both small and large companies the chance to network, learn and share experiences of life cutting code.

To kick things off networking and beers were the order of the day, as well as drying out from the biblically proportioned downpour. Once everyone had taken their seats we were treated to a lightning talk given by Andrés about how 7digital manage the structure of the database schema around ever changing development needs, and more importantly how this is version controlled to ensure traceability and that changes can be verified across environments.

One of the key takeaways from Andrés was that traceability in database changes is essential, and the process to log this changes should be the same and as simple as how changes are done for code. The failure to implement such a process makes people reluctant of fixing the database layer in favour of placing workarounds on top, which in itself is a code smell.

To follow up we had Paul Shannon delivering his Code Smells talk. Paul has toured this talk across the UK, and has honed both the talk and his nose for code smells to an exceptional degree. Paul began with explaining what a code smell was, it is an analogy taken from the smell given off from bad food.

Why should we worry about code smells was an initial reaction from many. Paul quickly explained that the core behind finding code smells was to make life much simpler for a development team. Clean code is easier to understand, work with and from a business perspective is cheaper to maintain and extend.

What are the smells? They include some obvious ones like having dead code included, if it’s not doing anything, kill it off. There are also some not always obvious smells included, such as an uncommunicative name, if it has a name that tells you what it does then there is no need for comments. Comments was a particularly interesting smell raised by Paul, generating plenty of comments about comments. Well actually it was more like heckles!

The evening had a great buzz and both speakers were well received by the audience. Many were taking detailed notes and were anticipating the release of Paul’s Prezi. On the wrapping up of the event, many of the discussions continued in the pub around the corner. With the success of this event we can firmly say that the devs are most certainly in the ‘ditch, and they are there in force.