Look around any software company and you’re almost bound to see developers, headphones on, coding away to their favorite tunes. For most developers, music plays an important role in their lives: from listening to it while they work to attending concerts or major music festivals, like Coachella and South by Southwest Music Festival (SXSW).
With the right tools, developers with a love of music can leverage their creativity and skills to wield a strong influence on the music industry itself. Over the past year or so, Cloudinary has sponsored a number of music-related hackathons, including those at SXSW, Canadian Music Week (CMW), Wallifornia, New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival, multiple Capitol360 events, and SF MusicTech Summit. Our role at those events is to show how Cloudinary can be an effective enabler for the music industry.
We believe that Cloudinary has the potential to be a democratizing force that gives everyone–from major music labels to enterprising young artists bootstrapping the start of their careers–the tools they need to more effectively market themselves online by leveraging various media. The Cloudinary solution, which offers an easy way to optimize images, videos, and music files for delivery on any device, is ideal for creating an enjoyable online experience with rich media assets for fans even if you’re not a big-budget artist with the power and resources of a major label behind you.
From working with the music industry at the hackathons, we’ve found that the participants, from software developers at the largest music labels to casual content creators, are always looking for an integrated, rich-media platform. Cloudinary has already proven its ability to offer such a platform in a variety of verticals, including ecommerce, app tech, and travel, so why not the music industry, too?
Cloudinary is perfect for handling mashups, combining all forms of media–audio, images, and video–for mixed-media use cases. Music industry hackathons give us the opportunity to showcase what Cloudinary can do and how it pertains to content creators. At the hackathons, we can demonstrate to the participants how they can leverage our offerings to manage user-generated content, perhaps enabling artists to share videos taken by their fans at concerts in a way that’s easily accessible to audiences far and wide. Developers also get to see how they can effectively integrate music within the context software for their media assets. See our Music Discovery Service and SoundBrowser posts.
So far, we’ve been amazed at the creativity the developers at hackathons have shown once they become familiar with Cloudinary and its capabilities.
And we also love the feedback from those folks, which is helping us identify opportunities to continually enhance our feature set to meet the needs of music-industry developers and enrich our product roadmap. What a win-win for everyone!
