“Odd haired DJ tweets tracks”

An interesting development in the world of minimal techno and slanty hair recently came to my attention via the Soundcloud blog.

Minus boss, lover of haircuts shaped with a protractor and clicky beats exponent, Richie Hawtin, has developed a plugin for Native Instruments popular Traktor software that posts each new track play to @rhawtin on Twitter, in real time.

So the rumours about DJs playing mixes and checking Twitter in the booth are most likely true! I’m kidding, I know it’s more complicated than that… Firefox makes Ableton crash for a start! True story.

Jokes aside, this is an excellent development and on thinking about it, it really could help artists out, as there are a number of uses for this kind of information that might not be so apparent on first look.

Here’s four that came to mind, and one that’s only there so I could say ‘data set’ and ‘hadoop cluster’:

1. “Hey, Performing Rights Society! Check this list!”

Getting an accurate representation of which records are actually played in clubs for the distribution of royalty payments by the PRS is really hard, but software like this could make things so much easier. I’d love to see a way to register a ‘performance twitter’ account on the PRS that could be scraped for accurate information about which tracks were played, at what venue, on what date and try to match them with the correct artists then allocate payments.

Artists that aren’t matched up properly could be presented in a simple UI that the DJ could check afterwards and clear up discrepancies.

2. “All live, all the time”

What a great way of powering a site this could be! Powering ‘live’ sites with track information allows for some epic extension and excellent levels of music discovery.

A DJ could tweak sections of their official site to react to the tracks they’re playing out in a club. The site pulls in links, pictures, video, mixes, related tracks, literally any data out there that you could match up with an artist or trackname.

There’s a great example of this in the Simon Cross constructed ‘Now Playing vs The Web’ prototype. His version is powered by the tracks currently being played by BBC Radio 1, as opposed to tracks published to Twitter but adapting it wouldn’t be hard.

3. “I so filled up the BBC with my mix the other night”

BBC Radio 1′s Essential Mix is one of the most popular DJ lead radio programmes in the world. You can find MP3 rips of the mixes online less than 2 minutes after the show goes off air and the web is filled with wonderful tracklist and mix archives dedicated to the show.

The tracklists for the mixes are like actual gold dust. No joke. If the tracks aren’t there immediately all hell breaks loose on the comments section.

The tracklistings are currently published in advance and go live right at the end of the show. This has been the norm for as long as I can remember and it definately was when it was my job to do that publishing. However, we always came across the problem of how to turn around tracklistings for Essential Mixes coming live from clubs or festivals. The demand for the list remains the same but turning them round is harder… So let’s publish them live via Twitter instead!*

*I realise that email, CMS for producers and typing up a list when you get back to the hotel are also valid options but humour me a little…

4. “It’s like Dopplr, but for music!”

If we lived in some sort of ideal world where every working DJ had the ability to live publish their sets as they happened then a ‘musical coincidences’ mashup would be lots of fun to work on. Especially for artists that release a new cut of a track on Friday afternoon to a large mailing list of DJs ready for the weekend. You could track the musical journey, play patterns, similarities, location of plays against each other and come up with an uber reaction sheet over just 1 weekend.

One line of information would be enough for me: “Your track ‘Sonic Biscuit Resolution’ was reported as being played 25 times between 6pm Friday 3rd July and 6am Monday 6th July.”

Click that and be taken through a Google Analytics style interface that shows me who played it, where and if anything interesting happened with it – for instance, the track may have appeared 3 times in a set by Annie Mac at Wax On in Newcastle. An error perhaps? It may very well mean the track got three rewinds and is in fact the standout killer track from the weekend.

Hell, if that wasn’t enough, take those plays and their location and put it on a map. If in doubt, always put it on a map!

5. “Is that a massive data set in your pocket or are you just carrying a Blackberry and an iPhone?”

Data sets are the new bevelled button. Having all this data out there would make someone’s Hadoop cluster very happy.

Everyone play nicely and tidy up after yourselves…

I realised whilst writing this that in order for something like this to work you’d need to get all standardy on people and have quite a lot of things in place in order for it to work once at scale, so if everyone could chip in on finishing this to-do list I’d appreciate it:

1. Take Richie’s software and make it work with Serato, Ableton and Pacemaker.
2. Decide once and for all whether it’s Artist Name – Track Title – Label
3. Install wireless broadband in every venue that has ever featured a set of 1210s
4. Do development over at the PRS so we can do that music reporting thing in number 1.
5. Set up separate Twitter accounts for every working DJ just for tracks (@martynplayed)
6. Develop some sort of open source Music Message Queue API type thing so we’re not bothering Twitter with this.
7. This could totally be gamed. Someone think of a way around that.
8. Go to Music Hackday because that’s where dreams like these may come true.
9. Give me the design skill to make pretty mockups of this stuff to illustrate my wordiest ever post.
10. Buy milk

Comments, builds and bitchslaps welcome on @martynrdavies or here.

This post was written to the beat of ‘Rave Side of the Moon’ by AGT Rave Cru, the Cursor Miner remix of ‘We Are Electric’ by Fischerspooner, ‘Bomb Scare’ by 2 Bad Mice and the Sub Focus Essential Mix from BBC Radio 1.