Since the birth of the peer-to-peer file-sharing service Napster in the late 1990s, the record industry has been the unwilling poster child for entire businesses being overthrown by the march of technology. The major labels, once all-powerful, now stand Ozymandias-like, looking out over their barren empires; an ailing HMV, long ago diagnosed as terminal, is finally in its death throes; and it looks increasingly unlikely that music will ever be paid for again. An industry that’s resorted to The X Factor is an industry in trouble.
Michael Breidenbruecker is the co-founder of the music streaming and recommendation service Last.fm, one of London’s big tech success stories. ‘When we started in 2000,’ he says, ‘there was no market. People pointed out that their computers didn’t have speakers, and asked how an internet music service like ours was going to get around that — and we didn’t have a clue.’ What they did know was that everyone suddenly had gigabytes of music, and no way of filtering out the rubbish.
So they spent five years building Last.fm from the ground up, living lives that resembled some sort of prequel to The Social Network — sleeping in tents on Breidenbruecker’s balcony and breaking university networks with the traffic to their site. And the lifestyle paid off. Before long people were raving about their service. In fact, some fans were a little too keen to hype it up. Following a system crash one day, the team was inundated with messages about how great its recommendations were. Which was surprising, as they’d forgotten to switch their algorithm back on, and were simply doling out random songs.
Last.fm and its music-streaming peers have very publicly turned music consumption on its head; but behind the scenes, technology has been quietly rewriting the laws of music production, too. This progression is far from unprecedented. The advent of musical notation didn’t just change the way music was transmitted — it changed the music itself by enabling it to become more complex. The birth of the record didn’t just bring music into people’s living rooms — it pretty much single-handedly set song length at three or four minutes for the next 100 years, since that was how long a side lasted. And now the internet and smartphones aren’t just revolutionising the way music is heard — they’re starting to revolutionise the way it’s made, too.
This development hasn’t escaped Breidenbruecker. His latest project is RjDj, a smartphone app that plays what he calls reactive music: music that changes according to your environment, as perceived by the sensors on your phone. To get an idea of what this sounds like, imagine Philip Glass is tiptoeing along behind you, recording everything from the Tube doors closing to the cyclist screaming profanities your way, fashioning it all into a beat and mixing it with the track playing over your headphones. All while you’re on acid. And that’s probably one of the tamer tracks.
Interestingly, this was actually the original idea for Last.fm. Breidenbruecker put together a prototype for personalised, reactive music software as far back as 1999, but, in a pre-smartphone world, he had nothing to listen to it on. He quickly decided, though, that he wasn’t going to be beaten by something as trivial as bad timing; so he strapped together a laptop and a couple of microphones and set off on a run around the streets of London. However, he’d have to wait for the arrival of the iPhone in 2007 before he could realise his vision. So, he says, ‘I thought that if I couldn’t personalise the song, I’d personalise the sequence of songs.’ And thus Last.fm was born.
To Breidenbruecker, the concepts of Last.fm and RjDj aren’t all that different: with both, the aim has been to get the most out of the technology of the time. ‘The smartphone is the music player of the 21st century,’ he says, ‘and it’s much cleverer than the music player of the 20th century.’ Does he think reactive music can ever take up the mantle of recorded music? ‘The current listening model has been around for a long time,’ he muses, ‘and a lot of listeners and artists are actually getting bored with it.’ The day that boredom reaches a tipping point, RjDj will be ready to welcome the deserters with open arms.
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