Sound of tomorrow: music customised to match your genetic data

Three weeks ago, I revisited 1995. My stepgran had sent me an HMV voucher for Christmas and so I went to the Piccadilly branch and spent 45 minutes walking the aisles, leafing through calendars and mugs, before buying a couple of shiny, highly scratchable CDs. The whole thing felt weirdly old-fashioned, like a village fête. This can’t last, I thought, and, in fact, HMV didn’t even make it another 48 hours. Two days later, on Tuesday 15 January, the company announced its bankruptcy, suspended shopping on its website and declared all vouchers void: RIP HMV. Thankfully, the £7.25 that was to remain forever entombed on my gift card was recently made redeemable, so I still have time to find a suitable memorial. Unfortunately, I’m 74p short: the One Direction 2013 Calendar is £7.99.

There’s been a lot of ink spilled about how technology is killing music. Because we listen to music track-by-track on services such as YouTube and Spotify, the playlist has vanquished the long player. We illegally download albums from torrent sites before bands have even had a chance to release them. If we do buy music, we buy it as digital files from iTunes, plug in headphones and turn ourselves into musical isolation zones. And all the while, record labels and artists are earning less.

Technology definitely killed HMV, and thank goodness. The retailer made its money from selling us CDs for £15; the same amount now buys you three months’ access to Spotify and nigh on every song in the world. New companies, new business models and new technologies are reinvigorating music. The iTunes store allows any artist in the world to get space on the digital browsing rack. SoundCloud lets musicians collaborate on tracks on the fly, then push them out instantly to their fans, using it as a test base for new music, and letting networks spring up around genres. Its ‘Electronic Music Group’ has more than 59,000 members, for example; even a niche genre such as Moombahton (reggae- ton meets Dutch house) can boast 3,700 users. YouTube supercharges the popularity of a song — Carly Rae Jepsen’s ‘Call Me Maybe’ became the most popular YouTube video of all time last year with 269 million views, before it was overtaken by PSY’s ‘Gangnam Style’ with 1.2 billion views. YouTube splits its advertising revenues with those making the content; it’s estimated that PSY has made $50 million.

Europe is at the centre of this thriving music tech ecosystem: Spotify and SoundCloud are both from Sweden; London companies include Songkick, Shazam and Mixcloud. It’s never been easier to make music — and it’s never been easier to make money from it. Global music industry revenues were $60.7 billion in 2006; in 2011, they were $67.6 billion. An increase in digital sales, from $2.9 billion in 2006 to $14.8 billion in 2011, has increased revenues from live shows from $16.6 billion to $23.5 billion.

That gap between digital and physical, between your music and you, is only narrowing. Smartphones mean music tailored to your tastes, your location, even your heart rate. Some apps are doing this already: Songza in the US and Project Now, from London-based company Reality Jockey, generate music based on what you’re doing or where you are. Both apps scour your iTunes and create playlists suitable for ‘concentrating at work’, using information from your smartphone such as your location, the time of day, the weather; a robo-DJ tuned to your taste.

‘It’s really the USP of music on the mobile,’ says Michael Breidenbrücker, who founded Reality Jockey as well as Last.fm. ‘The more music is becoming available, the more people want something that personalises it.’ When you have six days’ worth of music on your iPod, choice anxiety is a problem. Breidenbrücker is working with the musician Imogen Heap to take the idea further, with a jogging app that generates music according to how fast you run. ‘Instead of creating songs, the artist is creating musical worlds.’

Personalisation will only become more extreme: a soon-to-launch app plays music based on your heartbeat. Hold your finger over the iPhone’s camera and it detects your pulse by measuring fluctuations in the redness of your finger as blood flows in and out, then autogenerates a genre mix (heartbeat house, anyone?). Give it enough readings and the app can also measure stress levels from the variability in your pulse. Its founders hope to let users meet in real life if they have similar stress levels, which should make late nights at The Shacklewell Arms interesting.

In the future, instead of pressing ‘play’ and listening to a song that hasn’t changed since it was first burned on to a hard drive, music will be unique, reactive and amorphous. We’ll still buy it from digital stores but we’ll also buy less: if you have one track that adapts itself to different situations and can play forever, you don’t need a dozen.

And once the track is dead, truly custom-built music will thrive. Tod Machover, a composer and inventor at the MIT Media Lab, thinks that the notion of a hit song such as ‘Gangnam Style’ will disappear and every track will be customised to you, your genetics, your psychology, your physiology. He’s currently working with neuroscientists, tissue specialists and MIT’s Buddhist chaplain (to investigate physical benefits of spiritual omms) on how to achieve this. Real-time, personalised music may sound odd, but it used to be the status quo.

‘Recorded music is great, but it’s only been around for maybe 80 years,’

Breidenbrücker says. ‘Before recorded music, music was something that was always new, always different, depending on where it was performed and who performed it. We are seeing a movement like that in the future, but it’s based on new technology.’ ES