SOCAN tested, implemented, and received feedback on its Live Performances API (Application Program Interface) from two teams of app developers at the 2019 Wallifornia Music Tech Hackathon in Liège, Belgium, on July 2-3.
The teams’ goal for the 24-hour hackathon was to build apps that impact and interact with our own SOCAN Live Performances API – which already helps SOCAN capture information about a Live Performance, such as date, location, participants, and a setlist of the songs played, so that SOCAN can pay collected royalties to the appropriate party. The API integrates into different apps and services used by our partners, and speeds up the time to receive and process this information.
For the hackathon, SOCAN’s Program Lead for SOCAN Labs, Ryan Maule brought a new version of our API that not only was able to capture performance information for SOCAN, but also that of one of our sister music rights organizations (MROs), from Finland, Teosto. This was the first demonstration of an inter-MRO API being used in public, and one of which both of our organizations are proud.
The first team, Simpler SOCAN, created a multi-platform (desktop and mobile web app) solution which allowed a music venue to easily provide information about live performances happening at their location, while the mobile component also allowed the public to see a list of the live performances taking place. The team created a series of web forms to help facilitate the collection and submission of information back to SOCAN, or Teosto.
The second team, Facebook Royalties Management App, allowed artists and performers to log in to their app with Facebook credentials, extract (or “scrape”) event data to collect the necessary information about the performance, attach a setlist and then easily to submit to either SOCAN or Teosto.
Though neither of these apps won the hackathon, having our SOCAN API tested “in the wild” by developers, and be successfully implemented, gave us great feedback on, and stress testing of, our platform. It also proved out that our new inter-MRO capabilities work, and is the start of helping to increase processing time and payments, across the industry, for live performances.