7digital Blog

It was a fantastic week of meetings, metadata, and music for the folks bunkering down in Century City’sHyattfor NARM’s Music Biz conference last week. We started the week with digitalmusic.org’s comprehensive dive into issues surrounding metadata with speakers from all the important influencers. Other highlights throughout the week included the various working groups focused on improving issues in the digital supply chain, an afternoon of in depth discussions around automotives and music, a great day of demoing at app alley, and a luxurious awards show with celebrity guests that included Buddy Guy, Emeli Sandé, Jason Derulo, Natalie Cole and Tom Jones amongst others. Last but not least we had the pleasure of holding our own 7digital workshop recapping all of our favorite topics; licensing, APIs, music rights, and product development.

What does it take to launch a music application in 2013? read more »

Last month our own head honcho Ben Drury was at the Financial Times’ annual Digital Media Conference, speaking on the Sound of Innovation panel. It was an interesting debate, and the panel discussed everything from the growth in mobile and digital music to the revenue streams that were kicking around some 2,000 years ago.

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Last weekend I had the pleasure of  attending my first Music Hack Day in Paris. Kindly hosted by Deezer in their lovely trendy offices, there were about 150 hackers from both within and without France who’d come to hang out, drink beer, mess around with technology and generally have a great time.

The event kicked off with a short presentation from each of the sponsors, introducing their company and outlining the APIs on offer. Hackers then headed out into the blazing sunshine to discuss teams and ideas over a hotdog, before bagging a desk and settling down to work. Over the course of the afternoon and evening, folks alternated between bouts of intense concentration, games of table football, and replenishing caffeine levels. The background soundtrack of those Parisian favourites Daft Punk was occasionally punctuated by a friendly squabble over coding practises, or a burst of dischordant music as teams demonstrated their work-in-progress to each other. read more »

The Financial Times’ annual Digital Media Conference is almost upon us, and will be kicking off on 25th April.

This year our very own CEO and big boss Ben Drury will be in attendance and taking part in The Sound of Innovation panel discussion. He’ll be joined by a few of our fellow music industry experts, including our good friend Geoff Taylor from the BPI, SoundCloud CTO Eric Wahlforss, and Ian Hogarth of Songkick. The discussion will focus on the latest music and technology developments, and what we believe is shaping how people discover, buy, curate, share and listen to music.

We’ll be live tweeting from the @7digital Twitter handle during the panel, from 9.25am GMT on 26th April. Make sure to follow us to get the inside track on the discussion, and check the blog following the event for a full write up.

In the meantime feel free to take a closer look at the Conference’s Agenda and the below video to give you a gist of what you can expect this year.

We’ll see you/ tweet you (from) there!

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Late in Feb we had the pleasure of visiting the Catalan capital of Barcelona for the Heroes of the Mobile Fringe, an event that runs in tandem to the GSMA’s annual Mobile World Congress. Aside from reveling in the delights of tapas and cerveza, we were excited to be sponsoring a panel looking at the future of mobile music.  For us, the incorporation – or you may say coexistence – of music and mobile is king, and the way in which they feed into to one another opens up a world of opportunity. One thing so palpable at an event such as the Mobile World Congress is the need to constantly explore and analyse new avenues for your product and with that, be open to change.

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The team out and about

With over 100 venues hosting more than 2000 acts from almost every genre imaginable, SXSW is unquestionably the most significant event in the industry calendar for breaking new music. It’s not just the stars of tomorrow that are discovered there, either: this year’s festival hosted official showcases for high-profile acts like Depeche Mode, The Flaming Lips and Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and secret gigs by Justin Timberlake, Smashing Pumpkins and Flying Lotus.

Some of the more established acts making a splash this year included Alt-J, who look set to capitalise on their Mercury Prize victory by breaking America, Vampire Weekend, who were there debuting material from forthcoming record Modern Vampires Of The City, and hip hop star Kendrick Lamar, who packed out both Spotify House and ACL.

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This week we have been caught up in the whirlpool of  tech, music and interactivity at SXSW, busily chasing the aroma of freshly squeezed creativity like a pack of scent-hounds on the loose (and we’re not ashamed to admit it!). Though an event that only comes around once a year, the effects – or should we say outcomes (see below for a great infographic to support this) – of SXSW seem to reverberate for months after.

No sooner did we arrive in Austin did it occur to us that no matter the lengths we had gone to prepare for such an event, there was always going to be something to shake up our carefully planned agenda. But, don’t get us wrong, the haphazard schedule is certainly something to thrive on in the world’s live music capital; pop-up, kerb-side gigs and impromptu bulletins continually setting themselves as standard for the week. Amidst all that’s going on – and there really is a lot – we have been involved in some great panel discussions and artist interviews, meeting some really great people along the way; the latter being one of the real highlights of the festival for us.

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Neon lights surround the message of the new Samsung Galaxy S4 at Hong Kong harbour

With the hype surrounding last night’s unveiling of the Samsung flagship S4, the UNPACKED event at New York’s Radio City Music Hall had been long-anticipated for us here at 7digital. Not least for the sensational ergonomics that J. K Shin, the president and head of IT & mobile communications division, flaunted on stage – with new features including a touchless ‘Smart Scroll / Pause’ feature, the ‘S Translator’, ‘S Health’ and 13-megapixel, 360-degree camera  - but mainly for the fact that this new device in the Galaxy range has our technology powering the Samsung Music Hub app.

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In the midst of this year’s Mobile World Congress, hints at the next ‘big thing’ from Korean tech giant Samsung began to unfurl. Amid dozens of product launches at the the annual GSMA event in Barcelona,  Samsung were head and shoulders above the rest, boldly announcing their very own UNPACKED event to take place on 14th March to springboard their new smartphone.

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