musiXmatch Blog

Summer Internship @musiXmatch: spend 3 months in Italy.. Apply Now !

Thu, 29 Mar 2012 17:08:46 +0200

We are offering the chance to be one of the FIRST, and one of the very FEW people who will get the opportunity to Intern at musiXmatch for our Summer Internship.

This won’t be like any others Internship, we’re talking about Italy, spend the summer in Italy, being in Bologna, just 27 min from Florence and 1 hour by Venice and 2 and half from Rome.

More than all ….just 40min from the beach. Yep.

We know you’re talented, we know you’re smart and we know you’ve got a wealth of knowledge to offer us, as we do to you, so why don’t we learn from each other? We can’t promise there won’t be a little photocopying or a bit of toilet cleaning (we all do that, starting from our CEO), everyone has to pull their weight right? There will however, be so much more!

Our business is growing fast, musiXmatch apps are enjoyed everywhere in the world but sometimes, important projects get left as no-one has the capacity to take them on, projects which could make a real difference to how we operate, that’s where you come in!

We’re looking for enthusiastic, well-educated individuals with a passion for music and an ambition to go far, just like us. You should be studying for your Bachelors Degree and looking for an internship where you can achieve something to set you up for your future career.

You will work on a project for 3 months (May, June and July) and be mentored by the team to achieve an awesome result.

If you act well and put good effort you’ll be our guest for August too and enjoy Italy during Summer…well … that is kinda of experience sometimes in your life you have to make…

This could be in our Content, Marketing, and more than all Development area and working close to all our engineers.

It will be hard work, but you will enjoy the challenge of putting your academic experience into a REAL work environment.

What we will offer:

- a seat in our wonderful and brand new musiXmatch HQ
- a flat n Bologna to share with some others being part of the Internship
- Coffee, Coffee . Not the Starbucks one. The real one. The best one.
- Food, food, and what a food. Have you ever heard about food in Italy?
- 3 months of challenging experience working closely with all the team of one the coolest startup in the music space

If you fit the bill, are eligible to work apply now here , your first challenge will be the application, like us, it’s a little different! Go on, click the button, but make sure you do it quickly and by Friday 20th April as we won’t accept applications after that date!

Internship starts 1st of May. Apply here

The Echo Nest Blog: Musixmatch Brings Largest Lyrics Database to Rosetta Stone

Mon, 26 Mar 2012 19:45:03 +0200

The Echo Nest Blog: Musixmatch Brings Largest Lyrics Database to Rosetta Stone:

echonest:

Musixmatch tracks a lot of lyrics — that’s one reason why The Echo Nest enthusiastically welcomes Musixmatch onto our Project Rosetta Stone platform.

Project Rosetta Stone brings the unique ability to help music services “talk” to one another to the music and technology industries, by lining…

3,000,000 thanks. musiXmatch reaches 3 mln users worldwide and say welcome to new Android Lyrics Player

Mon, 27 Feb 2012 09:16:00 +0100

When it comes to communicating a milestone for a startup active in the music space by just 2 years, whatever it is it’s always exciting… Both for us spending night and day coding (and how many nights!) both for all our users.
If you happen to walk down the street and see people using musiXmatch or when it happens to go to a concert and to see a group of boys and girls singing with an iPhone in their hands, using the musiXmatch apps…..
…..well it makes you feel satisfied and happy.

Reading thousands of messages and feedback where people say “Thanks. Now I can finally read lyrics without googling anymore...”

Make us happy.

3,000,000 users worldwide access now to the world’s largest lyrics catalog ever created and developed by musiXmatch thanks to the worldwide licensing agreement with Top Major Music Publishers like Sony ATV, Emi Publishing, Warner Chappel, Universal Music Publishing, Kobalt Publishing, BMG Rights, Harry Fox Agency.

They do this through the mobile and desktop apps powered by musiXmatch.

We are pleased and proud, and as Lyrics market is still tough, with hundreds of illegal sites that provide lyrics without paying a single $ to Songwriters and Music Publishers, we are happy to be the preferred choice for the user who wants to sing….. anytime….and anywhere..

We celebrate today during Mobile World Congress 2012 our biggest milestone with the launch of the new musiXmatch Player on Android, an innovative player that allows you not only to look inside the largest lyrics database but especially to discovery new music, to identify Lyrics at any time from TV, radio and any music source… thanks to the powerful technology MUSIC ID powered by our friends at Gracenote.

Soon there will be updates on Iphone and many other news ..

It’s a long road and this is just a beginning for us.

One thing is for sure, we want everyone to use musiXmatch in the world.
We want anyone to sing thanks to musiXmatch.
We want to make happy as many people as we can.

3,000,000 people have made us happy today.

Thanks for all the love you gave us.
And do not stop following us.

Max Ciociola

CEO & Founder

Full Press Release is available here: http://bit.ly/musixmatchpress

Here we go with new musiXmatch web site

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 13:13:36 +0100

Just 18 months young, and we’ve just returned home through the snow from our 2nd Midem.

We wanted to say how excited we are with the buzz around musiXmatch. With our 2,6 mln app users, we have built a damn good database of lyrics covering more than 30 countries and 18 languages. But size doesn’t matter if you don’t have quality and that’s why we love feedback, especially positive ones telling us how great our service actually is. Our mobile app is available on Android, iOS, Nokia, and Windows and our desktop app is available for both Mac and now Windows too. We’re adding thousand of new users every day, so we think we’re doing something right and making people happy…. but this is just the beginning…

You may have noticed that we just launched our new website. The site features a fresh new look, easy navigation, and all the information consumers, partners, and developers need.

We received a lot of feedback in all this months on how to improve the site and one theme was for a more consumer focused approach. So, for all you non tecky geeks out there, less jargon to figure out!

We always said that musiXmatch is The world’s largest Lyrics Catalog so we have included a search bar where you can type in any lyric to any song and from our 6M large database and best in class matching ratios, we’ll display the song you’re looking for, instantly. No need to go Google and cross your fingers. LOL

And as always, we continuously look to improve and everyone’s feedback is welcome.

Thanks to everyone’s support and keep on singing!

Max Ciociola
CEO & Founder, musiXmatch

Former BMG Publishing CEO Nicholas Firth joins musiXmatch's Advisory Board as Chairman

Wed, 16 Nov 2011 13:34:18 +0100

musiXmatch has appointed former BMG Music Publishing CEO and chairman Nicholas Firth as chairman of its advisory board.

The move comes as the company announces it has signed up all of the major publishers to its site after closing a deal with Warner/Chappell and EMI Music Publishing earlier this month.

musiXmatch is building a fully licensed database of lyrics that other websites and mobile apps can plug into via its API. It matches the metadata submitted by publishers to the 6m+ lyrics on its database and presents this to third parties as a white label solution. Lyric searches can be treated by these third parties as a standalone proposition or as a value-add on, an existing music service.

Firth’s career in music publishing began in 1962, where he worked for the Chappell Group, then a division of PolyGram BV, culminating with simultaneous positions as President of Chappell International and Vice President of the PolyGram Publishing Division, which he held from 1981-1985. Subsequently, Mr. Firth was a shareholder and CEO of Music Theatre International.

His grandfather and great uncle, Louis and Max Dreyfus owned Chappell & Company in New York and London.

In addition to his duties at BMG, Firth is involved negotiating music publishing industry agreements in the U.S., Europe and the Far East.

Nicholas Firth serves on the Boards of the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP), the National Music Publishers Association (NMPA), the International Music Publishers Association (IMPA) and the Third Street Music School Settlement.

musiXmatch, The IMDB For Song Lyrics, offer now Lyrics app for Spotify and Itunes ; Passes 1M Mobile Downloads

Tue, 20 Sep 2011 23:34:23 +0200

I don’t know about you, but I’m awful at remembering the lyrics to songs, and I often find myself turning to Google search to answer my lyrical questions — and frequently, to lose arguments. Apparently, I’m not alone, as “lyrics” is one of the most searched-for terms on Google. While a quick search is often all one needs to flick on the light switch, overall, lyric search remains a pretty disappointing (and frustrating) experience. There are tons of lyrics sites out there, but most of them are unofficial, don’t have rights to broadcasting free lyrics, or they’re hiding malware.

Founded in 2010, musiXmatch is a startup trying to solve this very problem by building a database of legal song lyrics on the web in the hopes of becoming the IMDB for legal song lyrics. So far, the site has collected over 5.5 million songs (in 18 languages) and is not only building a database that meets with international rights management standards, but it is also developing an API to distribute its lyrics to music publishers, services, app developers, and hackers. Phew.

Today, musiXmatch is announcing the official launch of its “musiXmatch Lyrics App” for Mac OSX, which is available for $5 on the App Store. The plug-in enables users to automatically view full screen lyrics for the music they’re currently playing and includes support for iTunes and Spotify.

The widget is still in its early stages, and the team said that it will soon be giving music fans the ability to search for lyrics by artist, song name, or keywords, and browse discography info on albums and artists — and share that info with friends through social networks. (Another cool update coming down the pipeline: Enabling listeners to automatically embed the lyrics into the id3 tag of your songs.)

For iTunes and Spotify users like myself, musiXmatch’s widget is a pretty cool little add-on to the existing listening experience, as it automatically matches your iTunes and Spotify libraries (and automatically opens both), works with both platforms’ “radio” features, allows you to share lyrics to Facebook and Twitter, and receive Growl notifications. (And it works with Lion.)

In addition to today’s launch of its iTunes and Spotify compatible iOS plug-in, musiXmatch also shared with us that their mobile applications, which are available on iOS, Android, Symbian, and Windows Mobile, have been downloaded more than 1 million times. Over 50 percent of those users are active on a daily basis.

musiXmatch’s mobile solution allows users to easily find and match lyrics for their entire mobile music library, and with desktop availability, a sweet API that lets developers easily distribute kosher lyrics, the startup is becoming a very appealing service for everything from radio streaming platforms and video services to tablet apps and OEM manufacturers. With partnerships that include BMG, Kobalt, Universal Music Publishing Group, and Sony ATV Music, among others, musiXmatch is becoming a very interesting business and platform.

by Rip Empson

musiXmatch Lyrics app launched on Iphone and Android, fans gain access to the world's largest official lyrics database

Tue, 16 Aug 2011 22:35:46 +0200

Here’s an interesting fact for you – people search for ‘lyrics’ online in the US more often than they do for ‘sex’. musiXmatch brought this fact to our attention, and upon closer inspection it certainly seems to be true – indeed, ‘lyrics’ is the most common search term on Google in the US after ‘Facebook’.

With that in mind, musiXmatch must be onto a winner as the so-called ‘world’s largest official lyrics database’, and today it has announced dedicated mobile apps for iOS and Android devices.

musiXmatch has over 5 million officially licensed lyrics available via its API, and it delivers “100% licensed lyrics to any kind of music app or service”.

It enables developers and music fans anywhere in the world to harness the power of online lyrics, meaning it can be used for third-party services such as radio streaming platforms, video services, mobile audio devices, apps, and OEM manufacturers.

Now available for both iOS and Android, musiXmatch Lyrics uses music-matching algorithms to identify lyrics instantly that can then be matched with a user’s mobile music library.

Music fans can also search for lyrics by artist, song name, or specific keywords, as well as share and discover discography information for many albums and artists.

The app is simple and straight forward to use. I searched for a number of different artists and songs, across multiple genres and eras and it was pretty comprehensive. You can also share lyrics across all the usual social platforms, such as Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and email.

Max Ciociola, CEO and Founder of musiXmatch, said:

“By creating a free solution for instantly matching your music library with officially licensed lyrics, musiXmatch is aiming to simplify the end user experience around lyrics for music fans everywhere. We hope that by seeing musiXmatch Lyrics in action, developers will be inspired to create their own lyrics-driven experiences using our award-winning API.”

The company has raised $3.7m in VC funding to date, and earlier this year, musiXmatch announced partnerships with BMG, Kobalt, Universal Music Publishing Group, Sony ATV Music and more.

Courtesy of : http://thenextweb.com/apps/2011/08/16/musixmatch-lyrics-app-launched-fans-gain-access-to-the-worlds-largest-official-lyrics-database/

Forbes.com : Turning Lyrics into a Business musiXMatch’s Next Generation Lyrics API

Fri, 01 Jul 2011 11:41:46 +0200

Jennifer Hicks

DANTE’S SOMA

Recently, I attended a Lorenzo Jovanotti concert in Perugia, Italy. I’m a long time fan of the innovative Italian rapper for over a decade. Even though he sings in Italian, over time I have come to know most of his lyrics. Not that I know what they all mean, but I know them. At the concert, thousands of us were singing with him at the top of our lungs – lyrics committed to memory through repetition.

Then there are the songs I don’t know, but I THINK I know. When my brother was four, he used to toddle around singing More than a Woman by the Bee Gees – thinking it was Bald Headed Woman. We knew it wasn’t, but it was more entertaining to let him sing it that way.

When I want to look up lyrics today, I do it rather sloppily. Like most people, I go to Google, type in the band/lyrics and spend the next two hours slogging through the garbage Google dredges up. When I try and find a song on Spotify or iTunes and I can’t remember much about it, I search on key words, genre or lyrics I remember. I usually get the proverbial hand – or ‘try searching again with different terms’. I don’t like it, but I have come to accept this.

“Not many industries in our world have suffered so much disruption yet still exist, as the music industry has,” said Jeff Coe, serial entrepreneur and independent advisor in digital content. “That’s because music can never be superseded or replaced by technology, it’s just the way we consume it that has changed.”

According to Coe, with disruption comes innovation, and the music industry has spawned some of the most innovative technologies currently used. “The music industry and everyone inside of it have been forced to explore all the cracks and corners of the music world to find value for the consumer and clever ways to consume and experience music so that the money wheels keep turning.”

Coe is right. The music industry is a source of constant discussion and continual innovation – Shazam, Spotify, Pandora, Songkick – not to mention the grand daddy of them all, iTunes sitting on top of the heap with Apple working hard to keep the throne when it comes to music and content.

But, deep in the heart of Bologna, Italy, lies a new music start up who decided that lyrics are where its at in the new music value chain.

musixMatch is taking an unexpected approach to the shifting sands of the online music industry – they are focusing on lyrics. They adamantly say they aren’t a lyrics site, but the largest authorized lyrics catalogue in the world. The key word there is authorized. To date they provide 5.3 million authorized lyrics. They claim they will be the IMDB for music lyrics.

It’s pretty simple. musixMatch has created (continue reading here)

From Last.fm Blog : Lyric clouds, genre maps and distinctive words

Wed, 22 Jun 2011 15:07:59 +0200

One of the interesting things that sets even superficially similiar genres of music apart is their lyrical content. Last.fm tags can overlap to a great degree, but we were interested to see what the words can tell you about the subtler shades of meaning that go along with those tags. As usual around here, the best way to answer questions like these is by asking the data.

So I downloaded the musiXmatch dataset, a collection of lyric tables for nearly 240,000 songs from all around the world (and the musical universe). They are tables in the sense that they don’t contain the intact lyrics of each song, but rather a list of words present in each song, along with the number of times that word occurs. No use for karaoke, but perfect for investigating the overall properties of a genre. I then matched up the songs in the dataset with tracks in our own catalogue, and correlated this with Last.fm tag data, in order to count the number of times a given word appeared in each of several prominent genres.

Lyric clouds

Of course, lists of words and frequencies are a little dry, but thankfully IBM have released a Word-Cloud Generator which can take a weighted list of words and display it graphically, as seen on theWordle website. The more often a word appears, the bigger it will be rendered. Here’s what it came up with for the genres I tried — the software did the layout, but you can blame me for the font selection.

Continue reading here

We're Back(ed): musiXmatch Closes 3.7 million USD in Series A Funding

Mon, 09 May 2011 16:57:56 +0200

For the last 18 months, musiXmatch has been committed to providing simple solutions for the music industry. We created musiXmatch out of the belief that searching for lyrics should be simple, and that developers should be able to easily integrate music lyrics into existing music applications, without having to worry about distribution rights.

Our philosophy is that feedback cannot be discussed, it must be implemented. We believe that developer feedback and community involvement are the most valuable assets for product improvement.

In October 2010, we launched the first developer version of the musiXmatch Lyrics API, enabling hackers and developers to create and experiment using our platform. At the time musiXmatch did not even have an official site; just a Twitter account, an API and a dream.

The feedback we received from the developer and publishing community was incredible. We received hundreds of thousands of suggestions from developers from all around the world. We are incredibly grateful!

You helped us realize we were on to something big.

The more we worked on improving musiXmatch, the more we began to understand what factors motivate consumers to search for lyrics online. We realized very quickly that one of musiXmatch’s key product features was the ability to find matching lyrics for your existing music library.

Hence our name: musiXmatch

For us, the “perfect match” cannot be found through dating.

Instead, it is found in song metadata like this:

Title / Artist / Release / Music_Labels / Lyrics / Songwriters / Music_Publishers

There is no other service in the music industry today that associates and matches the music recording information Title / Artist / Release / Music_Labelswith music publishing data Lyrics / Songwriters / Music_Publishers

musiXmatch is first service in the world to provide this feature.

In terms of industry copyrights and legalization, we believe that we have helped the industry move forward, through creating a global distribution model and a simple monetization platform for digital lyrics.

Some skeptics have raised the question: “Why should developers even use a Lyrics API, when the lyrics are already on Google?“

Our response has always been:

”It’s inconvenient for users to search for Lyrics on Google“

Users want to have the most up to date lyrics perfectly matched to their music library. Instantly.

When you look at the fact that 10% of Google’s searches are music related and 70% of music queries are Lyrics related, you begin to understand the extent of the problem.

We aim to solve that problem.

In the coming months, musiXmatch will be expanding our service to include consumer focused solutions, offering the best Lyrics experience on the market.

Large problems require great solutions. If you bring passion and dedication to the table, you can create a huge business.

Today musiXmatch is pleased to announce that we have secured 3.7 million USD in Series A Funding, led by FMA fund.

This money will be used to improve every single experience of our API, and expand our distribution and content localization efforts in Asia and the U.S.

We will also open our first office in the U.S, acquire talented engineers, and significantly invest in improving our platform.

MusiXmatch aims to be the best Lyrics platform in the world, with a scalable API that allows anyone to access the largest database of legal lyrics online.

We want to thank the musiXmatch team, the developer community, and of course, our fans around the world. You make our dreams possible.

Ciao.

Max Ciociola
CEO & Founder
musiXmatch

The Echo Nest Blog: The Million Song Dataset gets lyrics, too

Wed, 13 Apr 2011 15:18:25 +0200

The Echo Nest Blog: The Million Song Dataset gets lyrics, too:

echonest:

The Million Song Dataset is a great collaboration between Columbia University’s LabROSA and The Echo Nest where 1 million songs worth of data was packaged up in a research-friendly format.

This week, the organizers of the MSD added lyric data with our friends at musixmatch. It’s not…

Copyright or Copywrong ? The mXm Escrow

Fri, 08 Apr 2011 15:39:00 +0200

Without a doubt the hardest practical problem to solve creating a legal music business online is getting your copyright ducks in a row.
You people already in the music business will know what I’m talking about. If you’re a developer just getting started, read on, this is stuff you need to know about.

The universe of song publishing rights is an extraordinary mess right now, and nearly impossible to sort out. Especially around Lyrics. There is no industry-wide clearinghouse or dataset for publishing song lyrics rights, and since these rights are often transferred from one publisher to another and country by country, with no centrally available records, the problem is compounded.

Incredibly, if I do say so myself, musiXmatch is the only company in the world to have closed international deals with almost all the major music publishers. Not to mention that tons of indies and small publishers are contacting us every single day and signing up en masse.

This has allowed us to claim a truly unique opportunity, to create the only dataset that can take a query and then match all the metadata — artist, song, track, album, music publisher and the lyrics themselves — in one coherent result.

Despite our best efforts, this stuff is so mixed up that we we don’t know if we get something wrong, perhaps exposing some lyrics that have been transferred to a different publisher without our knowledge, or exposing some lyrics in some countries we could not. OK, we’re human. But beyond that we strictly adhere to the DMCA and promptly honor all take down notices that we receive from legitimate copyright holders.

And when it comes down to the often thorny issue of revenues, we are white hat all the way. We track every use and monetization of each lyrics file in our database in order to pay music publishers their fair share. When we cannot immediately identify the beneficiary, we hold all revenues in a Special mXm Escrow account in order to be able to distribute these monies to the rights holders upon request. mXm Escrow is our copyright fund.

When we go to sleep at night, this is what we dream about:

Reorganizing the metadata for the world’s discography, including all instances of monetization, and to do so in a way that renders the data capable of yielding realtime reporting of usage and revenues;
Protecting the rights and livelihoods of songwriters who are seeing their work being used illegally and without retribution;
Educating developers and providers of digital music services that the future of music is one that respects copyrights.

But when we woke up in the morning, we realized that we needed another full-time person to make the dream happen. And so we just hired the incredible and indefatigable Susan Sabatini, new Head of Copyright & Catalogue.

Susan is perfect for this job: she’s got lots of experience dealing with the complications of rights management and huge libraries of music, plus she is unflappable even in the face of the thorniest issues — a must in this business. Susan will be keeping in touch with music publishers, managing the content team staff, the mXm Escrow and fielding all DMCA issues and rights holders’ claims.

Welcome aboard, Susan.

musiXmatch Tops the Billboard Charts with New Fuzzy Matching

Mon, 07 Mar 2011 16:00:00 +0100

Matching is our business.

You should be able to throw the lyrics of any song at our database and we should be able to match it with the correct track and artist. Period. Everything else is gravy. So, if you know anything about this business, We’re going to astound you with a little news flash.

We took every top 100 song on the official Billboard charts from 1946 through 2010 (that’s 65 years of top 100 songs, kids) and verified that musiXmatch can match nearly 95% of those songs to their tracks and artists (well, 93.2923% to be precise). No other service in the world comes close.

Here’s an unofficial source of Billboard Historic Chart. (We can’t share the official one here because of contractual issues.)

This is not magic. We reached this milestone by mashing up four elements: (1) signing agreements with nearly all the major music publishers, (2) carefully ingesting the lyrics and music metadata into an intelligently structured database (3) adding a programmable fuzzy logic capacity to our search algorithm and (4) a whole lotta love.

The fuzzy logic implementation (discussed here in the developer support area) is especially cool. It means that we can match a track whether the input is “Billionaire by Travie McCoy Featuring Bruno Mars” or “Billionaire (feat. Bruno Mars) by Travie McCoy” without missing a beat. Take a look at this graphic, showing results with and without the fuzzy search.

This is just the beginning for musiXmatch. We founded our company only one year ago with a single all-consuming obsession — to create the world’s largest fully licensed international lyrics database and to match it to 99.99999% of the tracks available in digital format. And we will get there. We despise phrases such as “not found”, “your search did not match any documents” or “try different words”. They make us nauseous!

We have matching in our blood, in our DNA, it’s baked into our very souls.

We have assembled a fearsome team of co-founders and developers with a burning passion for all things music, and we are all hackers to the core. Together we have created a wickedly wonderful platform (fuzzy logic included) and a kickass API that you can get up and running quickly and painlessly.

The music business is finally showing positive signs of catching up to what the technology allows. It may be a tough slog, but we are committed to working with the other awesome startups in our industry to shine a beacon on the future of music. But we need you. We can’t do it alone (and it wouldn’t be as much fun) without you hackers, startups, artists and fans.

This is going to be a wild ride. Watch this space!

P.S: The data displayed in the graph are based on the results of matching Billboard’s historic top 100 charts, obtained through our premium Billboard account, with musiXmatch’s own Lyrics DB.

Frank Denbow is The new musiXmatch hero : meet SongVooDoo

Wed, 02 Mar 2011 15:00:08 +0100

Let’s say you’re out somewhere and you hear a great song playing on the sound system but just as you’re getting into it, the tune ends. And now you’re singing the chorus to yourself and trying to figure out how to identify the song and artist.
Here’s where our hero comes in. Frank is the creator of SongVoodoo.
Send a simple mobile text message (SMS) of the lyrics snippet to +1 917 934 3979 and get back an immediate response with the name of the track and the artist. For instance, send Go shawty its ya birthday and SongVoodoo sends you: That song is In da Club by 50 Cent.
Simple, right? And powerful.
Song lyrics are the poetry that surround us everyday as we go about our lives and now there’s an easy way to identify and discover those new songs that are getting into your head! Once you know the name of the song you can even send an SMS to listen to a clip of the song to get you singing again. Just send the text #play Michael Jackson billie jean and you will get a call back playing a clip of “Billie Jean” by Michael Jackson. Sweet !
SongVoodoo is built on the API’s of three wonderfully hacker-friendly companies, Twilio (for the SMS/text features), 7digital for the music clips and our own musiXmatch for the lyrics and was built during MusicHackday in NYCFrank has just gotten started, as he says :

This has sparked an interest in understanding the lyrics space on the web, seeing if there are other ways in which I can expand SongVoodoo to serve the lyrics needs of people online.”

What about you? Do you have a music app trapped inside of you ready to be released into the wild? Add a lyrics feature to multiply its awesomeness.
Be a hero.
Be our hero.

Image courtesy of Erdaniz Erda

The Future of the Music Industry Starts Here

Fri, 25 Feb 2011 00:05:20 +0100

echonest:

The Echo Nest announced a partnership with Island Def Jam today that will finally bridge the gap between cutting-edge app developers and the most popular music in the world. First, a little background on how we got here…

A few months back at Boston Music Hack Day, I overheard some excellent developers — all of whom have built music apps you’ve heard of — passionately and intensely discussing the finer points of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), mechanical royalties, and Fair Use. As a recovering music lawyer, I usually dig those conversations. But I couldn’t help but leave that one feeling that somewhere along the line, we as an industry had gone astray.

Why were these guys, who aren’t lawyers and have no interest in becoming lawyers, spending the few hours they have together in Boston navigating the legal complexities of building music apps? Our industry should be better at figuring this out so that developers can focus on what they do best, while the music and technology industries provide a support network around them to handle licensing and monetization.

Virtually every other creative industry has solved this riddle. Why not music apps?

For years, we at The Echo Nest have looked toward a future where any developer can build a great commercial music app that includes the most popular music in the world and compensates artists fairly without being sidetracked by the hassles and transaction costs that have come to nearly define digital music. Most of the people reading this are well aware of the frustrating gap between innovative app developers and popular music. That gap hurts content owners, app developers and, ultimately, music fans, who never get to enjoy all the fantastic ideas that never see the light of day, due to licensing headaches.

Today, we take a big step towards closing that gap.

We’re pleased to announce the world’s first direct partnership between a major label and the app developer community. As part of this agreement, Island Def Jam, the leading division of the biggest record label in the world, Universal Music Group, will make its music and videos available through The Echo Nest’s APIs so that at long last, thousands of app developers on every platform will be able to build commercial music applications around Island Def Jam’s incredibly popular catalog of music.

Together, Island Def Jam and The Echo Nest send a clear message to the developer community: Focus on creating a great user experience, and we’ll handle the rest. The Echo Nest is supplying all of our deep music data and developer tools, while Island Def Jam provides top-flight music and videos, and manages the rights issues associated with distributing them within the apps you create. Our shared goal is to power new, highly-attractive experiences for music fans, to promote Island Def Jam artists and distribute their music in clever ways, and to create new revenue streams for the dual creative forces at the root of tomorrow’s music industry: app developers and recording artists.

I have to give major props to Island Def Jam and Universal Music Group for their vision and conviction in taking this major step. Expect a lot more to come…

- Jim

Music Hack Day NYC 2011

Sun, 13 Feb 2011 00:35:00 +0100

generalassemblyblog:

General Assembly is thrilled to present New York’s first Music Hack Day—a full weekend of hacking (organized by John Britton) in which participants explore and build the next generation of music applications. For more information, please visit musichackday.org

Midem 2011, How Music is Changing: Long live the Hackers!

Wed, 26 Jan 2011 19:00:00 +0100

I’ve attended @Midem for the last 12 years and there’s one thing that’s still the “same”, Cannes has super vibes around entertainment and music and spending 2-3 days there is always cool. The sun helps and I love running on the Croisette early in the morning.

This year’s vibes were especially amazing. I’ll try to explain.

I attended very few panels; they tended to be boring rehashes of things we already know. Instead I spent most of my time talking to people, matchmaking, mentoring, attending special events and meeting with my team. And you know what? The best part of Midem is now Midemnet. No contest.

Obviously I was really happy to have been invited to participate in the session called “How to License Your Music Business Worldwide.” That was particularly cool for me because it gave me the chance to share my experience and knowledge with all kinds of people who were eager for some guidance on how to take their local music service from local to global.

But the coolest part of the entire Midem, hands down, was the MusicHackDay. Let me set the scene. Imagine a crowded room filled with not only hackers but people from the music labels (major and indies), publishers, artists, journalists and industry analysts. There was electricity in the air as the hacks were presented and long time industry insiders were clearly blown away by the creative mashups that the developers were able to produce in just 24 hours.

Companies such as Soundcloud, Last.fm, The Echonest, Bmat, Extension.fm, 7 Digital, SongKick, Musescore and musiXmatch participated in the all-nighter and delivered an amazing showcase of apps. You can see them here.

After all was said and done, I hadn’t heard or seen anything new and exciting from the main Midem show, but it was clear to me and others that the new promise for the music industry is being delivered by the developer community. The next wave of growth in the digital music economy is going to be hacker-powered!

You don’t believe me? Just ask Martyn Davies, a hacker’s hacker, why he was hired by Universal Music. Yes. Universal Music.

The industry is finally getting that being OPEN means being OPEN MINDED, OPEN to experimentation and being OPEN to hackers and developers mashing up the services. Open is not just a slogan, it’s the essential ingredient to being successful in a rapidly changing landscape.

On the other side, developers and hackers, who in the past may have ignored copyright issues, are clearly understanding the value of working with licensed content to power their apps and services.

Artists and writers deserve to get paid for their awesomeness.

Hackers deserve to share revenue if they can increase distribution and track usage through their API’s.

Therefore, this is my dream and the winning equation:

Rightsholders + Hackers + API’s = Healthy Digital Music Industry.

Long live the music! Long live the hackers!

Max Ciociola

CEO & Founder musiXmatch

(image courtesy of flickr/Mayhem aka Robert Kaye from musicbrainz)

More Coverage about hacks here too :

http://evolver.fm/2011/01/25/midem-music-hack-day/

musiXmatch taps Universal Music Publishing Group, BMG, Kobalt Music and Sony ATV Music to Create World’s Largest Lyrics API for Developers

Mon, 24 Jan 2011 10:24:00 +0100

musiXmatch Launches Commercial Beta of the Largest Commercial Lyrics API, Provides Developers Worldwide Access to more than 5 Mln authorized Lyrics

CANNES, Midem – Jan 24, 2011, musiXmatch, the leading provider of digital lyrics solutions, today announced partnerships with BMG, Kobalt, Universal Music Publishing Group, and Sony ATV Music, giving musiXmatch the largest authorized lyrics database in the world. Launching today, the musiXmatch commercial beta enables online music services to increase user engagement and SEO traffic using lyrics, empowering developers to legally create, monetize and distribute the next generation of fully interactive music applications.

With over 5 million lyrics available, musiXmatch is the only lyrics API to fully provide international rights management, enabling developers to quickly and easily integrate real-time lyrics into music services around the world. musiXmatch is currently used by hundreds of developers worldwide, and is the only lyrics service to offer an affordable pay as you go business plan.

“We are happy to support musicXmatch with their initiative to legitimize and develop our lyrics business. They have created the first truly open platform for developers to quickly and easily integrate lyrics into their music applications. This will be of benefit not only to us as publishers, but more importantly to our songwriters. stated Guy Henderson, Senior VP International for Sony ATV. “Through musiXmatch, Sony ATV will be able to provide lyrics to users of music around the world.”

“The search term for lyrics drives more traffic than any other term on Google,” Said Max Ciociola, CEO and Founder of musiXmatch, “musiXmatch gives developers the lyrics that they need to create deeper and more engaging online music experiences, at a truly affordable price. We are very excited at the positive reception that musiXmatch has received from developers and company, and we are looking forward to working closely with our partners to deliver the best lyrics content possible on any platform.”

musiXmatch API moves from Alpha to Public Beta

Wed, 19 Jan 2011 17:55:00 +0100

The musiXmatch api team is pleased to announce that the Public Beta release is now available.

When musiXmatch api first launched we received a lot of attention from both corporate and small business about scaling our platform for a production environment with high peaks of traffic.

We always care about performances and stability and we keep working to develop a full scale monitoring platform and much more.

During our private Alpha test we served millions of api requests at an incredible growing rate. In the first decade of January we had already served 10X API requests than the whole December!

In this alpha period we’ve received many useful feedbacks to improve the service and we’ve optimized our platform to make it more stable.

In the meanwhile you have developed many nice showcases and some very interesting applications, we love you guys !

In order to help you more we’ve added with the Public Beta Release new support’s source for you guys :

support.musixmatch.com New Forum, Support, Ticket’s Request

New Twitter’s API Support :

www.twitter.com/musixmatch_api

Welcome to the Public Beta API

Enjoy !

mXm Team

API 1.0 at the end. Coming Out New API 1.1

Fri, 14 Jan 2011 17:01:00 +0100

As announced 3 weeks ago in these post we are going to shut down the 1.0 version of our Api.

The last day we grant the 1.0 api to be running is January 16th 2011.

There are still few of you using it, so please upgrade to 1.1 within this sunday and remember to fulfill the instructions about the copyright and the tracking pixel given here:

http://developer.musixmatch.com/wiki/track-lyrics-get

Thank you

mXm API team