Where are the female music tech startup founders? Here’s a list

Conference organisers and journalists are trying to do a better job at diversity, but unfortunately, it’s not always easy. Let’s change that.

I get asked a lot whether I know any female founders at music tech startups. Together with some wonderful people on Twitter and on my newsletter, we’ve been putting together a list. Feel free

I’ve made a start at this list – together with some wonderful people on Twitter. If you think anyone is missing, please use this form to add them. And please don’t feel excluded if you don’t identify as male or female – drop me a note (@basgras on Twitter, my DMs are always open) & I’ll figure out another name for this list.

Direct link to list.

This list looks better in Google Sheets: click to open.

10 Lesser Known Tools for Making Music in your Browser

When the urge to get creative strikes, here’s how you can drop a beat fast.

It’s not only the internet’s websites and platforms that change. Under the hood, our browsers are getting more powerful, allowing for rich experiences without having to manually download apps.

Here are ten fun tools to drop beats right from your desktop browser.

 

Splice Beat Maker

https://splice.com/sounds/beatmaker

Splice Beat Maker

How it describes itself: Make and share beats in your browser.

How it works: Splice Sounds is a subscription service with a million loops, samples and presets for producers. Beat Maker allows people to dig into Splice’s library for free. You can check out beats created by established producers, remix those beats, or just start from scratch and program something yourself.

First impression: You can easily spend hours on this. What I find most remarkable about it is that this is a perfect example of marketing done right.

 

108

http://martinwecke.de/108/

108

How it describes itself: A minimal beat machine in the browser.

How it works: You see a dot moving around a circle and you can populate the circle with drum samples by using your keyboard. Each time the dot hits the sample, it plays it. It runs at 108 beats per minute, hence the name.

First impression: Easy if you want to mess around quickly put some drum pattern together. Unfortunately everything gets placed in a grid: this makes it hard to create something terrible, but also hard to play with timings and get really creative.

 

Blokdust

https://blokdust.com/

How it describes itself: BlokDust is a free to use web-based music, sound and instrument creation app.

How it works: The web app gives you a tool box to generate tones, feed them to effects, link them to interactive components like your computer’s keyboard or even a MIDI controller, and has different tools that lets you power up the events. Because of the latter, you can create self-playing devices that generate soundscapes (click here for an example that lets you interact through the bottom row of your keyboard).

First impression: Very cool, very powerful. Not only do they provide an extensive set of guides and tutorials, but the project is also open source and the developers invite people to learn from, fork, or contribute to the code.

 

Sample Stitch

http://samplestitch.com/

Sample Stitch

How it describes itself: Try re-constructing the samples of popular producers’ beats.

How it works: It takes the original samples used by 3 popular hiphop tracks and lets you recompose the beat using your keyboard.

First impression: Fun to play around with and try to build something cool. It’s good to read the stories at the bottom of the page, too. It gives a perspective about the amount of work hiphop producers put into digging for samples, picking the right ones and constructing beats out of them. One downside: at the moment of writing the share-function is busted.

 

Incredibox

http://www.incredibox.com/

Incredibox v4

How it describes itself: Incredibox is a musical app in which you can quickly and easily create a mix by running a band of beatboxers.

How it works: You start with one guy. When you give him an accessory like a hat or sunglasses, he’ll start beatboxing or singing. As soon as you dress someone up, another guy appears until finally the box is filled with 6 beatboxers working on your song.

First impression: This one’s truly for everyone. It’s so easy that it’s impossible to make anything that doesn’t sound good. There are 4 editions, I suggest you start with the newest ones. Each edition has special unlockable moments that you have to find by combining the right elements… so it’s a game, too!

 

Voice Spinner

https://musiclab.chromeexperiments.com/Voice-Spinner

Voice Spinner

How it describes itself: Spin the spinner like a record player — slow, fast, forward, backward — to hear how it affects the sound.

How it works: Click the record icon in the middle. Say something, sing something, rhyme something. Then use the slider below to play it back in various ways.

First impression: Cute little tool to play around with. Especially fun to then play some music from another player and try to layer your vocal on top of it. Highlighting this, because it’s part of the Google Chrome Music Lab which has a dozen other music making tools for in your browser.

 

YUME

http://unseen-music.com/yume/

YUME

How it describes itself: YUME is an interactive musical exploration created to promote the new album from ambient artist Helios. Manipulate sound and explore a dream-like world.

How it works: You‘ll see a screen with diamond-shaped objects, or perhaps kites, that you can drag to manipulate the sound. As you play around with them, you can explore other areas in the audiovisual world, which will have other configurations.

First impression: The initial screen is a little bit confusing, but that ends up really encouraging exploration, which is the right way to bring people into these types of experiences.

 

Sampulator

http://sampulator.com/

Sampulator

How it describes itself: Music production made easy. Create beats in your browser.

How it works: Your entire keyboard gets turned into a sampling machine. It allows you to program drums, including some great 808 sounds, keys, vocal samples, and more. If you’re good, you can make fantastic beats like this.

First impression: This is right up my alley, because I love 808 driven beats and it has some samples common in the juke and jersey club genres that I often listen to. I like that you can play stuff live and then drag them around in the grid, in case your timing was off.

 

wavepot

http://wavepot.com/

wavepot

How it describes itself: The digital audio workstation of the web.

How it works: A better description would be: live programming music. If you’re a decent programmer, you can make some cool things with this. If you’re not, then just load up one of the examples and start editing numbers and variables and see what happens.

First impression: Reminds me of ‘algoraves’ where people live program music in front of audiences. I wasn’t able to get the sounds out of it that I wanted to, but the interface (or lack thereof, I guess) makes up for it.

 

Orbit Sampler

http://www.dreampipe.io/orbit/

Orbit Sampler

How it describes itself: Another browser-based music production app by DreamPipe.

How it works: Despite the lackluster description, it’s one of the more interesting tools. It lets you arrange your samples in circular sequences, which is sometimes argued to be a more intuitive way to visualize rhythms than the typical bar line.

First impression: Save it for the weekend or a late evening. It’s very powerful, but a bit hard to do something quick, because of the level of detail it offers. You can spend hours and hours on this.

 

Having fun? Drop some of your most creative work in the responses to this piece. No time to play and want to listen to music made by others? Click here for some great tools to discover something new.

10 Lesser-Known Tools for Music Discovery

Radio, streaming services, social networks – everyone has their own way to discover new music. Meanwhile, there are dozens of entrepreneurs out there who believe they have a better way. Here are some of the best ones out there.

 

cmd.to fm

http://cmd.to/fm

cmd.to fm screenshot

How it describes itself: This is not your mothers radio. Listen awesome tunes from cmd.fm’s curated playlists.

How it works: It’s radio powered by a command-line interface. To keep it easy, it lets you click on the most essential commands. Player controls are activated by typed commands. All music appears to come from Soundcloud.

First impression: Fun! And I’m pretty sure this is how hackers listen to music. Does this make me a hacker?

 

MagicPlaylist

https://magicplaylist.co/

MagicPlaylist screenshot

How it describes itself: Get the playlist of your dreams based on a song.

How it works: You type the name of a song in a search box and it automatically generates a Spotify playlist with 30 other tracks.

First impression: It succeeds because it doesn’t let itself fail: generating a playlist from one track doesn’t create huge expectations, so it doesn’t disappoint. The playlists are not amazing, but it works as a quick way to pick a theme and have some music to listen to.

 

Cymbal

https://cymbal.fm/

How it describes itself: Discover songs the world is falling in love with.

How it works: Cymbal is a music social network that looks and feels a lot like Instagram.

First impression: Easy to use, because they make use of familiar interfaces. They make it easy to share content outside of the app, which is important in the early stages of social networks. Upon first try they really show you where the content is, so you immediately have something to check out. The onboarding process has too many steps and needs work. Ideally, you let people use the app ‘immediately’ and guide them through it, nudging them step by step to connect other accounts, etc.

As a social network, you need a certain critical mass to let users retain each other, so they should consider how to improve sharing the content outside the app in such a way that:

  1. Users will use the app, even if their friends are not on there;
  2. The content becomes so engaging that their friends will join.

 

trbble

https://trbble.com/

trbble screenshot

How it describes itself: Discover new music by listening to a song’s best part first!

How it works: trbble sources music from Soundcloud and lets users define the most important part of the song, so others can get a quick impression of it. This 30-second clip is then called a trbble. The playback and upvote count of your trbbles is displayed on your profile. So there’s an incentive for active users to provide music for passive users.

First impression: Found it hard to get used to the interface, but there’s a use case to explore. trbbles could perhaps provide a passive stream for DJs to listen through a lot of music, instead of actively skipping through tracks. I think conceptually it could be interesting, but needs to simplify its interface.

 

A Song a Day

http://www.asongaday.co/

A Song a Day screenshot

How it describes itself: Music from humans, not robots, delivered to your inbox every day. Because people are cool.

How it works: Give your email address, select which genres you like, and maybe select a curator. From that point you’ll receive new music recommendations, every day, in your inbox.

First impression: What I really like about the way it’s designed is that at every moment in the sign-up process, you can either give your preferences or say screw it, just send me some music. Simple and does what it says. I could imagine this having some growth potential.

 

Rising.fm

http://rising.fm/

Rising.fm Screenshot

How it describes itself: Music charts powered by Soundcloud.

How it works: It looks at data from “social media sites” and has a simple ranking algorithm to come up with charts. It’s basically an easy way to discover popular and trending music on Soundcloud.

First impression: Works well for the default tags and very popular search phrases, but if you go a bit more obscure, you get no results (eg. psytrance, goa). Even ‘trance’ returned just 6 results of which 3 were not trance. Perhaps it’s just not tracking the right blogs for that.

 

22tracks

http://22tracks.com/

22tracks screenshot

How it describes itself: 22tracks is a brilliantly curated playlist service, run by 120 expert and influential DJs from Amsterdam, Brussels, London and Paris.

How it works: The service appoints curators for genre-based playlists in each city. The curators are mostly local DJs, journalists, etc. with many being known within their scenes worldwide. Each playlist consists of 22 tracks and is updated regularly. You can save tracks to your own 22 track playlist.

First impression: Very cool concept, and so simple. They seem to monetize through brand partnerships, but I imagine they should be able to monetize part of their userbase at a low price point (between $1 and $4 per month) for additional mobile features like offline syncing, personalization, and perhaps exclusive premiers.

 

Chew.tv

https://chew.tv/

Chew.tv screenshot

How it describes itself: DJs everywhere. Right here.

How it works: DJs can livestream their DJ sets on the platform, but you can also rewatch sets later. You can find all kinds of electronic music on the site, basically: if you can imagine it, they’ve got it.

First impression: Fun. Takes me back to when I would put Boiler Room sets on my TV all day long. This is a bit more personal, as you can follow DJs and also engage with other listeners through the chat function. In terms of music discovery, it would be nice to have some type of dynamic tracklist, but having a phone with Shazam handy has done the trick for me so far. And else you can always just tweet a DJ to ask about that track you must find!

Check out my interview with Will Benton from Chew.tv.

 

Wonder

http://wonder.fm/

Wonder screenshot

How it describes itself: Wonder is a platform that simplifies indie music discovery — a place to hear what’s new as soon as it’s released.

How it works: Wonder uses some ranking mechanism to find trending tracks on Soundcloud and then presents 99 one of them to the user. Some research suggests that after the algorithms surface tracks, some human curation is involved.

First impression: Wonder is a great way to find hot new tracks before they make it to the charts. I personally enjoy Primary and Whitelabel off-shoots more, which represent hiphop and dance music respectively. Very high quality tunes. Throw out your radio.

 

Muru

http://murumusic.com/

Muru screenshot

How it describes itself: Create your own music journey.

How it works: You pick a genre as departure point, another genre of where you want to go and then the app creates a playlist that builds from the former to the latter. You can adjust the tempo, energy, popularity, and vocal-drivenness of the tracks in your playlist, as well as the length of the playlist.

First impression: There’s quite a bit of work to be done. For one, it’s currently iOS-only, and you have to connect to Spotify. The authorisation process is a bit of a pain in the butt when first launching the app, especially if you just want to try it. I’d move the ‘Connect to Spotify’ step to after playlist creation. That way you already have commitment from the user. To avoid disappointment, the necessity for Spotify should be communicated upon launch. I also wasn’t able to find the genres I prefer, because they’re not available in the app yet.

There’s plus points too: the app’s design is neat and the playlists it creates are interesting. This is in part by the concept of genre journeys: you immediately start to wonder how the app is going to transition from Blues to EDM.

5 Big Ideas for the UK Association of Independent Music

The Association of Independent Music (AIM) recently put out a call for ‘big ideas’ to be discussed at their Annual General Meeting.

“The goal is to produce and publish by the end of this year a manifesto which sets out 10 big ideas to help the indie sector to thrive in the coming years.”

I’m not a member, but not shy to give a bit of unsolicited advice.

Here are my 5 big ideas:

Streaming exclusives

The indie sector needs to widely speak out against streaming exclusives. After years of hard work, we’re now sending music fans back to pirate services. Let’s keep working on sustainability, instead of sacrificing it for short-term gains.

  • Streaming exclusives may be making the music piracy problem even worse >>>
  • Why streaming exclusives are bad for the music business >>>
  • Spotify: Streaming exclusives are bad for artists and fans >>>
  • Why exclusives are terrible for fans, artists, and the streaming music business >>>

Startup license

Establish a framework which allows startups to quickly and flexibly license music from indie labels for a set duration. The prospect of spending years in licensing negotiations stops entrepreneurs and investors from supporting innovation the independent music sector desperately needs. Let’s remove the necessity to negotiate for the most common use cases.

  • The case for a startup license: why startup founders choose to ignore music copyright law >>>

Focus on dance

The Netherlands is stealing the UK’s spotlight as the centre of global dance music with events like Amsterdam Dance Event, major DJs, and a huge global dance event business. The UK has a rich history of dance music and is home to some of the best artist, clubs, and labels in the world. It needs an action plan to assert itself. With Sadiq Khan as London’s Mayor, there has never been a better time.

  • London Mayor Sadiq Khan is looking for the UK’s first night czar >>>

Refugees

Develop an initiative to help artists and aspiring musicians among the refugees arriving to the UK. They bring a unique cultural and musical perspective, which could blend into the UK’s rich multi-cultural musical tradition. They need material assistance in the form of access to equipment and instruments, as well as contacts in local radio stations, venues, etc. Besides the musical benefit, there is also the advantage of contributing to better assimilation of new arrivals.

New anti-piracy research

A research initiative looking into the return on investment of money spent on countering digital piracy. With countless anti-piracy companies popping up, it should help indie artists and labels determine whether their money’s best spent growing their fanbase and making more music. It’s important to know what anti-piracy methods pay off, and what’s just a way to use the threat of piracy to get musicians to pay up.

Foster my ideas

Since I’m not a member of AIM, I cannot officially submit these ideas. If you’re an AIM member and interested in fostering the streaming exclusives, dance music, or refugees idea, get in touch: bas@musicxtechxfuture.com

5 Bots You’ll Love

Since launching its chatbot API last April, Facebook’s Messenger platform has already spawned 11,000 bots. Bots are popular, because they allow brands to offer more personalized service to existing and potential customers. Instead of getting people to install an app or visit your website, they can do so from the comfort of their preferred platform, whether that’s WhatsApp, Messenger, Twitter or something else.

Bots, basically automated scripts with varying levels of complexity, are ushering a new wave of user experience design. Here are some of my favourite bots.

AutoTLDR – Reddit

AutoTLDR bot

AutoTLDR is a bot on Reddit that automatically posts summaries of news articles in comment threads. tl;dr is internet slang for “too long, didn’t read” and is often used at the top or bottom of posts to give a one-line summary or conclusion of a longer text. It uses SMMRY‘s API for shortening long texts.

The key to its success is Reddit’s digital darwinism of upvotes and downvotes. Good summaries by AutoTLDR can usually be found within the top 5 comments. If it summarizes poorly, you’re unlikely to come across its contribution.

Explaining the theory behind AutoTLDR bot.

Subreddit Simulator – Reddit

Subreddits on Reddit center around certain topics or types of content. Subreddit Simulator is a collection of bots that source material from other Reddits and, often quite randomly, create new posts and material based on that. Its most popular post is sourced from the “aww” Subreddit and most likely sourced two different posts to create this:

Rescued a stray cat

Check out other top posts here. Again, the reason why it works well is because of human curation. People closely follow Subreddit Simulator and upvote remarkable outcomes, like the above.

wayback_exe – Twitter

Remember the internet when it had an intro tune? wayback_exe takes you back to the days of dial up and provides your Twitter feed with regular screenshots of retro websites. By now, it’s basically art.

It uses the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, which has saved historic snapshots of websites.

old site 1

old site 2

pixelsorter – Twitter

If you’re into glitch art, you’ll love pixelsorter. It’s a bot that re-encodes images. You can tweet it an image and get a glitched out version back. Sometimes it talks to other image bots like badpng, cga.graphics, BMPbug, Lowpoly Bot, or Arty Bots. With amazing algorithmic results.

 

Generative bot – Twitter

Generative bot

Generative Bot is one of those bots that makes you realize: algorithms are able to produce art that trumps 90% of all other art. It uses some quite advanced mathematics to create a new piece every 2 hours. Seeding your Twitter feed with occasional computer-generated bits of inspiration.

Want more inspiration? We previously wrote about DJ Hardwell’s bot.

What are your favourite bots? Ping me on Twitter.

 

5 Easy Ways to Stay on Top of Trends (for Busy People)

There’s a certain advantage to being ahead of the curve. In an age of constant disruption, the benefits of learning about a new tool or technology before your competitors can be immeasurable. So how do you stay aware of new trends and developments in your field or industry? Below are 5 convenient ways. They just take a minute to set up.

Newsletters

Yes, it’s 2016. Yes, newsletters are one of the best ways to stay up to date on trends. Browse for great newsletters on NewsletterStash or Revue. If you’re using Gmail, you can add a +tag behind your name in your email address, so that incoming newsletters all get tagged the same way. Like so: name+newsletters@gmail.com. This helps you filter them into separate folders so they don’t clutter up your inbox. It’s called subaddressing and many email providers besides Gmail support it too.

Facebook Groups

For every topic you can think of, there’s a Facebook community. Members share relevant links relating to the topic and you may find the discussions useful too. Also, it can be a good way to connect to other professionals in your domain.

Reddit

Like Facebook, Reddit has a ‘subreddit’ for all kinds of topics, like privacy, transhumanism, freediving, the list goes on. Search for some interesting ones, subscribe to them, unsubscribe from the default ones, and return to Reddit regularly. You now have a curated page with links and discussions relevant to your interests.

Twitter

You probably already know the name of some thought leaders and interesting publications or blogs in your domain. Follow them on Twitter. See who they retweet. Follow them if relevant. See what recommendations you get to follow accounts. Soon you’ll have a constant flow of, more or less, relevant content.

You can also build lists of people who’ve posted tweets with a specific hashtag. Lists are a useful way to build more tailored streams.

You might even get to know more about the people you follow, where they get their information from, and perhaps discover a new newsletter, Facebook group or subreddit. Don’t forget about the unfollow button when someone keeps cluttering your feed.

Audible

Ever busy with your hands, but not that busy with your mind? Amazon’s audiobook service, Audible, offers audiobooks on every topic. It recently also incorporated podcasts in its app, so you can learn while you cook, workout, cycle, or shower. For a $15/mo membership, you get 1 free audiobook a month. You can actually try Audible for free and get two free audiobooks.

Here are some top notch audiobooks about the future and how to study it:

Got more? Ping me on Twitter.

Now that you’re all set up, why not learn how to efficiently share what you know on social media?


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