Music Ally

UK newspaper The Guardian is to host the first ever Music Hack Day this weekend, with 200 participants monkeying about with APIs provided by several online music firms.

It’s being organised by SoundCloud’s UK manager Dave Haynes, and his company will join 7Digital, BBC Music, Echo Nest, Gigulate, Last.fm, People’s Music Store and Songkick in opening their full APIs up to the attending developers. Attendees will work through the night to prototype and build new projects based on the APIs from these sites, with prizes awarded to the best examples.

“It’s time for the music industry to start working with web technologies and innovation, not against it,” says Haynes. “Instead of suing the people coming up with the most popular new music apps, we should be embracing them.”

We’ve been watching People’s Music Store closely since its launch earlier this year: it lets music fans set up their own digital music stores, stocked from a central catalogue maintained by the company. Until now, though, those tracks have only been from independent labels.

That’s now changed, via a deal with Universal Music Group to add more than 300,000 of its tracks to the People’s Music Store catalogue. UMG is thus the first major label to sign up for the service, bringing artists including Amy Winehouse, Duffy, Morrissey, U2, Guns’n'Roses, Kanye West and Jay-Z to the service, which has so far seen more than 1,000 people launch their own stores. 

It’s not just music fans either: People’s Music Store says labels like Ninja Tune, Rough Trade and Lex are using the service, as well as artists like Nightmares on Wax.

“We are excited to have the Universal Music catalogue on People’s Music Store because it shows that forward-thinking labels are willing to try new ways of connecting artists with fans,” says founder Ged Day. “This addition doubles our catalogue to 600,000 tracks and means that our storekeepers have even more options to choose from when stocking their stores.”

UK startup People’s Music Store has announced a seed round of funding from media entrepreneur Paul Higgins, while also announcing a licensing deal with Beggars Group. Users of the site can set up their own online music stores, choosing from a catalogue of more than 250,000 songs from Beggars’ catalogue and other indies.

The service has been in alpha for a few months, with more than 650 stores already set up. The company is the brainchild of Ged Day, founder of Warp Films and the music store Bleep.com. Each storekeeper decides which bands to sell and how to market it – for example by writing their own reviews or adding widgets to their social networking profiles or blogs.

The main homepage then features music according to popularity metrics from all the stores. Users keep 10% of the proceeds from sales made through their stores, although rather than cash, they get credit to spend on music downloads.

“I believe the collective knowledge of serious music fans is more compelling and can scale more effectively than any company can do on its own,” says Day. “That’s the idea behind People’s Music Store – giving fans the power to curate their own online stores, promote their favorite artists, and write about the music they love. We think this will create an authentic, new way for people to discover and purchase music online.”

Examples of popular People’s Music Stores can be found here, here, here and here. Having indie labels on board is a good start for the service, particularly for the keen music fans and bloggers who are likely to be early adopters. As yet, there’s no news on major label deals to bolster the catalogue.