Since I’m a music blogger and lover of technology, there was no way I was going to miss Love, Music and API’s featuring Dave Haynes from Soundcloud and Matthew Ogle from Echo Nest (formerly Last.fm).

The discussion started with a brief history lesson on control and influence within the music industry. The old gatekeepers to consumption used to be radio djs and record shop gurus. There have also always been the influencers, like Simon Cowell, who identify bands and publicize them to the public.

But as technology plays a greater role in the industry, new gatekeepers are coming to the surface, and the panelists feel strongly these new gatekeepers will be developers.

Napster, music blogs and a three letter word (mp3) tore down the establishment over the last decade, but now we have a different three letter word for change: API.

API stands for application programming interface, and in this context, APIs offer an easy way to share information between different web sites and applications.

The panelists noted that the inherent substances in the creative process are no longer about raw, technical creation. Rather, it’s about curation and coordination building on existing structures. Since technology is so available, affordable and accessible, the limiting factor in creating a new music experience is now simply creativity.

The panelists cited the following data sets which are currently available via API:

  • Artist stats/metadata
  • Events
  • Gig tickets
  • Similarity
  • Tags/genres
  • Content/streaming
  • Images
  • Recommendations

Ways this data can be used include:

  • Playlisting
  • Acoustic analysis
  • Lyrics
  • Audio identification
  • Chart data
  • Metadata
  • News feeds
  • Search

As these elements come together, they can be combined for audio streaming, live events, custom recommendations and new uses not yet created. That’s what the rest of the panel was about.

The panelists are founding members of Music Hack Day. Conceptualized in London two years ago, Music Hack Day brings together music start-ups and developers to spend a weekend creating new innovations with the only requirement being that they have to be about music. The concept has grown across the globe, with events in countries including the U.S. and France, and it has attracted over 1800 attendees representing 200 music and tech companies to-date.

Some of the creative outputs from these events include:

  • Earth Destroyers – plot the touring schedule of a band to see how far they go between each show to determine if your favorite band is an “Earth saver” or “Earth destroyer” based on their carbon emissions between each show. Nickelback is an Earth saver. Bon Jovi is an Earth destroyer because he hops between the U.S., Europe and Asia for his shows.
  • Invisible Instruments – an iPhone app that mimics guitar, violin and drums
  • Piracy – using an Android application, you can drop a track at a specified place on a map that can be “picked up” by someone else. It’s basically a real-world treasure hunt as you walk around town finding tracks that have been dropped.
  • Citysounds – mapping SoundCloud artists into a local music interface. It has an iPhone app now.
  • Scrobbyl – this app listens to what’s playing around it and pings Echonest every 20 seconds and posts to your Last.fm account. This works well for those listening to vinyl – posts it to Last.fm just like iTunes would.
  • Bragging Rights – designed to settle arguments between music hipsters about who discovered what band first by going through scrobbles to see who tagged what song first.
  • Find You Some Vinyl – an easy tool to determine which record shops have what records in stock.
  • JSONloops – an audio-sourced sequencer for your browser built pre-HTML 5.
  • The Swinger – this app uses time-scaling techniques to add a swing beat to your songs. SO COOL! Lots of examples here. Here’s Every Breath You Take:
    Every Breath You Take (swing version) by TeeJay

    Here’s White Rabbit:
    White Rabbit – The Swing Version by plamere

  • Speakatron - which uses facial recognition to detect when your mouth is open and makes music.
  • iSticks - a steel drum application for the iPad
  • 6 Degrees of Black Sabbath – using the wealth of amazing music data that shows who played on what record, you’re able to put together a musical version of 6 Degrees of Black Sabbath.
  • Songshirts – give it your Last.fm user name, and it displays your favorite songs on shirts you can buy.

A key success of Music Hack Day is that people aren’t trying to make money. They pool their creativity and remove the constraints of issues, copyright and business models. Many of the hacks die. Some may live on but aren’t going to scale or make money (e.g., http://findtheband.com/). And many have commercial releases.

Below are just two of the collaborative tools that have kicked off recently built on the ecosystem of existing APIs:

  • Tastebuds - a London-based dating site that’s focused on musical taste.
  • Discovr - a paid iPhone and iPad app that gives you a touch-graph style artist similarity browser.

This was a tremendous panel, and I can’t wait for the next Music Hack Day. I’d actually love to help hold an event in Minneapolis. Even more importantly, there are lessons here that apply to non-music brands, too. Offering commodity data via APIs offer the developer community the opportunity to experiment and conceptualize new and radical thinking that would not be possible without making these kinds of data sets available. Cool stuff.