Music Hack Day in Berlin starts today and goes till the 20th of September. We’re really excited about this event because we love music. So we got an interview with David Noël of Soundcloud to tell us all about it.

Tell us about Music Hack Day – who are the people, and what is the idea, behind it?

Music Hack Day is a Hack Day specifically for the music industry. The first ever Music Hack Day was organised by Dave Haynes (who also works for SoundCloud from London) and held at the London offices of The Guardian over the weekend of the 11/12 July 2009.

In the last 4-5 years, we’ve seen a lot of innovative web companies attempting to solve problems around music: Last.fm has paved the way for music discovery and music streaming, Imeem and MySpace have become major players in the music industry. Lately, more and more companies have started tackling more specific problems revolving about music and the web and a lot of them have seen the potential of open API’s and the power and creativity such platforms can have. If you look at Twitter and how it has created a whole market around applications built on their API, we can see a similar trend around web services dealing with music. Be it Last.fm, SoundCloud, Echo Nest, Songkick as pure web platforms but also big publishing powerhouses like the BBC or mobile developers like RjDj. Even companies like Native Instruments or Ableton that mainly create classic desktop music software are joining in after seeing the possibilities it can offer: there’s so much that can be achieved on top of music data and it’s exciting to see how those companies can leverage this to offer new ways for people to listen, discover and make music.

The Music Hack Day is a perfect forum for that – an un-conference – where you basically throw 100 developers and companies with API’s into a room, let them hack away for two days and a night, see the light of the day on Sunday and – boom – you suddenly have 30 totally new “products” for people to test, use, enjoy and develop even further. Really exciting and the response to the event has been so great that we have Hack Days planned in Amsterdam, Boston, NYC and even Mumbai.

What makes Music hack day special? Why in Berlin?

The special sauce of such a hack day are the people attending: the setup is clearly a working environment and developers from around Europe are excited to spend a weekend digging into code and coming up with great new ideas. The difference is, that rather that being a huge brainstorm session, folks actually get things done and create stuff in really short sprints. Citysounds.fm for instance (that has seen some massive traction lately: 100.000 visitors/month) was built in London in only 15 hours. What users see is perceived as a brand-new finished product where you can browse the latest tracks uploaded to SoundCloud by city. It’s a perfect and easy way to discover the sounds played in the cities across the world. Tune in to Detroit, Melbourne, Tokyo or Barcelona.

Why Berlin? That’s easy. No other city in the world combines web developers and people excited about music. In fact, music and web development often comes hand-in-hand for people here in Berlin. Just look at all these companies like Ableton and Native, the club scene, the startup environment. It’s one of the few cities in the world that combines coding and music/arts/creativity.

Who is attending/involved in this event? What is the longest distance anyone travels for Berlin Music Hack Day?

Developers and companies attending will be from all around Europe, the longest distance will be traveled by Ben Lacker from The Echo Nest, who’s flying in from Boston in the US. However, we just got word from Sid from Mumbai who will participate remotely and demo his app via video conference on Sunday.

What was the craziest “hack” coming out of the last event in London? What are your expectations this time around?

YouTube – My percussion machine finished
Percussion Machine
Hacks

Expectations: following up with projects from London, presenting some beta versions of soundcloud API-related features and just having a great time geeking out :)

Thanks, David! Sounds like Music Hack Day will be pure awesomeness!

This entry was posted on Friday, the 18. September 2009 at 08:35 under the category General. You can follow any comments to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.