What do you get when you combine music with frantic, all night hour coding sessions? An event called Music Hack Day, where developers have 24 hours to hack together a new music-related app, which they then show off to their peers at event’s conclusion. Music Hack Day has previously been held in London, Berlin, Amsterdam, Boston, and Stockhold; this is the first time it’s coming to the Bay Area. The event runs May 15-16, and is being held at the Automattic offices at Pier 38 in San Francisco.
The main goal Music Hack Day, according to its homepage, is “to explore and build the next generation of music applications”. Aside from that, anything goes — it just has to do with music. Space is limited, so you’ll want to register here (it’s based on a first-come first-served basis, and the organizers will also be looking to ensure the people attending are planning to actually help make something).
Music Hack Day is run by an interesting group of guys with experience in both music and tech: Dave Haynes (of SoundCloud), Paul Lamere (of Echonest) and Daniel Raffel (Senior Product Manager at Yahoo!, used to run some record labels). Also attending the event will be representatives from music companies like SongKick, Pandora, SonicLiving, Songbird, and Last.fm.
The timing is also good for developers: Muisc Hack Day is taking place the weekend before Google I/O and the SF MusicTech summit, so developers from out of the town can hit up multiple events on the same trip. So rock on. And try not to think too hard about the pain some earlier music startups have suffered through — things are finally looking up for a few of them.