MIDEM HackDay was – as expected – a wonderful event, where 18 hacks have been built over the week-end (screenshots on this MIDEM blog post).

In particular, I’d give my thumbs-up for Tourrent - helping bands to set-up their next tours based on Torrent downloads of their tracks, FlatDrop - Micropayments for Soundcloud tracks, and Badgify - audioscrobbler meets Arduino.

Together with Ian from rd.io and Guillaume from Webdoc, we’ve worked on a new music discovery approach, leveraging real-world data. Various 4-square hacks enabling geolocation-based discovery have been build on previous MHD, so we’ve decided to take another route: take a picture of anything, and play the songs that reference this thing. Whether it’s a bottle, some brown sugar, or a house.

So here’s Mixture, a simple hack / proof-of-concept of the approach, combining APIs from IQ Engines (image recognition – give it a try if you’re looking for something similar, even though queries can be a bit slow), musiXmatch (lyrics identification), rd.io (music streaming) and seevl (artist data). It may still be buggy (we’ll work on it) and some APIs have a daily-rate limit that could block the application, but you should be able to get the overall idea!