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The third annual music tech & data conference & workshop, Measure of Music took place Feb 24-26, 2023, presented by Audiense and SoundCloud. There were 95 project participants, 40 speakers, 8 weekend staff members, 27 mentors, 23 judges, 15 sponsors, and over 2700 spectators. The number of spectators grew by almost 1000 people from year two. Project participants watched the 16 talks and panels while having just 48 hours to put together a music data project that they presented to the judges and their peers with the help of mentors and staff throughout the weekend and data, project ideas (and prizes!) provided by sponsors. Our sponsors this year were SoundCloud, Audiense, HIFI, jump. global, Feed Media Group, TuneCore, Chartmetric, Musiio, The Orchard, Luminate and BMAT Music Innovators with promotional support from Queer Capita, The Digilogue, Women in Music and shesaid.so.
Participants ranged from all over the world, across 8 timezones and were teamed together to create their projectes. Participants were free to choose their own topics but overall the topics widely fell into 3 areas: business development & commercial; live & IRL and artist-focused. Our winning team presented on finding companionship through music. Our second place team focused on lyrical analysis and our third place team focused on reviving an artist's catalog using data.
The 95 project/hackathon participants came from 17 countries and were teamed together to create their projects. Participants were free to choose their own topics but overall, the topics widely fell into these areas: Live Music, Fandom & Community, International, Metadata & Playlisting. Our winning team this year included a member of last year's second place team, Aaron Dutschmann. A quarter of participants this year have participated in one or both of the previous years--a testament to the strength of this community. Our first-place team presented a project called "Collaborata", an A&R Analytics tool to help facilitate international artist collaboration. Our second-place team presented a project called, "From Streams to Seats", a way to understand the optimal concert venue size using fan data. Our third-place team presented a project called "commUNITY", which is an app to build community & engage with fans without using multiple digital platforms.