Online Mash-Ups and the Future of Music

Behind every online mashup, there's an API (or two). That's short for applications programming interface, a set of commands that lets programmers write new code that controls an existing piece of software. Many APIs are proprietary, but the Net is full of open APIs that let anyone, say, play a YouTube video on their own Web page or overlay bike routes on a Google map. At today's SF MusicTech Summit at the Kabuki Hotel in San Franscisco, a panel of dyed-in-the-wool geeks urged the music industry to embrace open APIs as the foundation of a new kind of music industry.

Exhibit A: JamBase, an online concert database founded in 1998. In the early days, says founder Andy Gadiel, managers, promoters, and ticket sellers were loathe to share information about performance dates and venues. So Jambase made it as easy and powerful as possible, offering a public API that funneled the data directly to its own site and, at the same time, made the same information available to other developers who might find clever things to do with it. The suits changed their minds as the online community transformed JamBase data into tour maps, performance calendars, and Internet radio programming, all of which promoted concerts without requiring the businesspeople to lift a finger. For instance, iConcertCal mashes up JamBase with your iTunes music library, letting you know when your favorite artists are playing nearby.

Gadiel doesn't worry that JamBase is giving away the store. In his view, the company's value is aggregating data and putting it in a consistent, useful format - not holding onto it. He has built a solid business helping managers, venues, and record companies promote their products and services (not to mention selling ads on its site), while spawning innumerable sites that combine JamBase content with data drawn from Facebook, Flickr, Justin.tv, Netflix, Skype, ad infinitum. "It's a weird spider Web of data," says Lee Martin of Silva Artist Management, who drew on Twitter and Imeem APIs to create twt.fm, which lets artists he handles tweet songs rather than having to come up with a 140-character quip.

The upshot is that, from the audience's point of view, music - or any kind of information, for that matter - no longer emanates from a centralized source. Instead, it reaches listeners' ears through a plethora of tweets, blogs, widgets, apps, social nets, search services, recommendation engines, and the personal messages from the artists themselves. "Every session at this summit has talked about things heading in that direction," said panelist Jason Feinberg, who offers music marketing services through On Target Media. Ultimately, some sites on the Net will provide content, while others provide context - and users will see neither, but a combination of the two.