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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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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This week was teeming with industry news, not least for Barcelona’s Mobile World Congress that took place, and once again showcased the crème de la crème in mobile craftsmanship and innovation. Of course,  the IFPI’s 2013 edition of their Digital Music Report, revealing the music industry’s growth for the first time since 1999, became a hot topic, the extensive document nurturing widespread optimism from within the notion of an ever-diversifying and expanding market.

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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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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??

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

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.

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.