Helo meets Open Source Project Owners - Marianne with Sonar

This is the first submission of a blog posts series where I will meet with open source project owners and discuss how Utopian.io can help their development and they tell me about their project. I will focus on their story rather than repeating to you how great Utopian is, since you already know that. You can expect more blog entries as I meet more project owners. I believe Utopian.io can make a big difference in the open source community and project owners.

Marianne and I met at a presentation I co-animated at the @surplace media collective where I talked about Utopian. From that interaction, we both saw an opportunity to further the discussion.

The Sonar project and how bands & the live music industry could benefit from an open source approach on Utopian.io

Tuesday April 3rd 2018, Surplace, Montreal.
Marianne, Sonar; @helo, Utopian.io

Background: Marianne worked a few years in concert & festivals production in France and QC, mostly emerging artists; then on research on the impacts of digital tech. One day she thought there could be a better way to use digital tech to help discover emerging artists.

Her observation was that:

1. I should technically have access to all the music in the world, but I don’t really - Music discovery is, like most subjects nowadays, heavily polarized by algorithms tailored to feed you what you already know and like (e.g. Spotify, YouTube). Not that easy to truly get out of your comfort zone.

2. How on Earth can new bands make money? - “Discovery” tends to be limited to one track you’ll add to a playlist you’ll play on your laptop or mobile. That brings virtually zero revenue to the artist. You need millions of plays and for that majors/big ad budget still pay a part, sadly. In the long run, it might threaten music diversity. Touring brings more money now (and even increasing recording sales e.g. vinyls at the end of the show), but…

3. It’s surprisingly hard to explore shows around you - Sure it’s easy to know when your favorite band is coming to town and even receive alerts for it (Bandsintown, Songkick…), but when it comes to discovering less known bands, scrolling through a list of names (providing that such a list exists) doesn’t give you much info unless you have a lot of time.

Meanwhile, venues spend a ridiculously huge amount of time entering info about their shows (Facebook, ticketmaster or other, website, local calendars…), and every week I see a musician friend on Facebook asking for venues and festivals listings that might need a… [insert music style] for… [insert time period] in… [insert region]. This info is cautiously kept locked up by [insert name of organization that makes money out of people’s data].

There was the promise of the self-made band. Of the local company operating with lower costs. Of infinite access to art creation. None of these promises were really kept. The consequences are that artists and local venues are still struggling and that music is still mostly being consumed as plain entertainment.

Sonar’s story: Sonar is a belief that music can help us better understand the world. That if you could explore music through space and time, you could discover communities that come together through concerts and festivals, and underline social movements. And that if you decide to take part in it, you might even experience that emotional connection that brings people closer even when they don’t share the same culture or language. That’s what music has always done for us and this is what we should facilitate, if not save.

At its core, Sonar is a webapp that gathers info about shows (band, venue, festival, genre, styles, city, date…), links every band to a videoclip and puts them on a map to generate interactive and geolocated playlists of shows. So you can listen to what’s playing this week in Montreal, Berlin, Buenos Aires… stumble upon new sounds and communities. Like a radio where all the DJs are the awesome bookers of local venues and festivals. And you can go see the band. Or randomly listen to the music played in a completely different scene. This isn’t just about shows - it’s about exploring the music being created today throughout the world, without any preconceived idea. Serendipity.

Marianne worked on 2 versions of Sonar with 2 different teams - unfortunately they could never find the right model or proper resources. The first try was called Livetracks - 100% DIY, very ambitious (worldwide), long php code (not great for collaboration), ugly design but very cool features (every word is a tag you can click on to refresh the playlist; search box). Backend was a lot of scraping and APIs - great info but many issues. For various reasons, team split.

Marianne tried to resuscitate the project a while later, worked with a new dev and a way more modulable / mobile friendly approach. They joined a startup program but that model (i.e. monetizing users, looking for investors) proved to be in deep conflict with their values, and the ones of many people of the emerging music scene. Backend was manual at first hoping to solve the frontend part first and get funding. It came close but didn’t work.

sonar demo (summer 2017) video

What now : There can be many interfaces. But at the core of the problem lies the question of data. This data (who’s playing where, with who, what it sounds like, when, in which context) rightfully belongs to the venues, festivals, bands and even the fans. With it, we could do funky discovery tools like livetracks/sonar, but also:

• a sort of LinkedIn for bands enabling them to see where a similar band played,

• a collective DB for pros - search through bands, venues, festivals, promoters and other professionals anywhere and filtered by genre for instance, make partnerships, bridge local music scenes at the international level, see who works with who (linked open data),

• a global calendar to know what venue needs a band for an opening act this Tuesday and vice versa,

• a DB where local calendars and blog could go get the events info so they can focus on quality content like interviews and articles,

• visualize trends for academics, documentary makers, crazy music fans… (e.g. turn genres into colors and see how’s the live music scene been evolving in Harlem).

We know the current main data sources and APIs we could go get to begin. Also these guys are working on a way to structure events data and give back the ownership to the events managers: “We built our Footlight technology to make events findable on the Web and ensure that arts organizations will always be the digital authority of their own metadata - not Google, not Facebook.” (but maybe not mention them until I’ve talked to the CTO again). We need to end 2 endless circles: the one where music pros need to constantly update their info everywhere, and the one where they lose that info.

From what Marianne understand, Utopian wants to reward the real contributors to projects that benefit to everyone. This is what real artists do: they create original works of art to move people, to express a social change (or they are the expression of that change), they contribute to the advancement of art in general, across centuries. The less dependent they are on intermediaries and the more we can facilitate their work, the better it will be for them and for the fans of good creative music.

As the project owner, I suggested that she makes task requests on Utopian for developers and designers at first. And as the project grows from #utopian-io contributions, other aspects of task requests could come into play.

Github repository: https://github.com/Meshu/sonar

The project has been waiting for new developers to get involved for 9 months now. Utopian would be giving new hope to her project. The project has been waiting for new developers to get involved for 9 months now. Utopian would be giving new hope to her project. We are looking forward at other discussions and to bring this project on Utopian.io

I've made my pitch, I hope Sonar finds new life with new devs where all can benefit thanks to Utopian.io

I've made my pitch, I hope Sonar finds new life with new devs where all can benefit thanks to Utopian.io

@helo is a moderator on Utopian.io, a developer and a STEEM witness who attends and present frequently at MeetUps.

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Posted on Utopian.io - Rewarding Open Source Contributors

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