Source: hypem.com

Hot music start-ups abound in New York, even though Limewire (NYC) was sued and shut down, Amie Street (Long Island) was acquired by Amazon and shut down, and a neutered Kazaa (NYC) limps along in relative obscurity. Still, the Hype Machine (Brooklyn) is going strong and Ex.fm (Soho) getting off the ground; Grooveshark also has an office at WeWork and Spotify is hiring here. The Music Hack Day hackathon at General Assembly produced at least 72 projects and was also well-attended by hackers and given a lot of attention by investors and media.

Now General Assembly is announcing Music Start Up Academy, a series of six classes starting April 14 to teach music tech entrepreneurs how to start a company.

"The Music Start Up Academy is a series of six sessions designed to reduce barriers to entry into the music business for entrepreneurs," the press release reads. "The coursework will provide a clear roadmap to success by offering actionable insights into the core structure, legal framework, content deals, business models, and the “nuts n’ bolts” of getting things done to build a legal, streamlined, and competitive music property."

The classes will be held from 6 p.m. to 7:30 p.m. at General Assembly for $30 per session or $150 for the full course; courses will be taught by different instructors from music start-ups and companies; an RIAA rep is teaching a session on piracy. Registration is open now.

The series was developed by the New Jersey-based nonprofit National Association of Recording Merchandisers, a trade association for the business side of music,and digitalmusic.org.

Photo: Thomas Bonte

The Pollyanna could not be more excited about the startup scene! She gushes about it every week on Betabeat. Today's installment: The amazing wonderfulness of hackathons and how flat-out awesome they are! 

I rode the Startup Bus to South By Southwest; here's proof. One of the companies from New York won! That's pretty exciting considering there were two buses from the Bay Area! Dave McClure was one of the final judges. I asked him, “So, is New York the new awesome, or what?” He said New York's tech scene is great but we need to “stop smelling our own farts.” Which reminded me of the bus!

That was just a segue! My favorite thing in New York tech this week was actually not the Startup Bus, even though it was so sad when it ended. It reminded me of my last day at journalism camp. (Hey Startup Bus--Miss you guys already! Seriously, huuugs!) Lives were changed by that bus. Even our bus driver got startup fever! I talked to him after we got to Austin and he said he was going to take a computer class and who knows, maybe launch a company. Do it!

My favorite thing this week is related to the Startup Bus. It’s hackathons! New York has had some rocking hackathons recently, even though some people complained that other people cheated by presenting pre-built apps. These events are a major boon to the scene and a great way to introduce out-of-town hackers to New York pizza. I especially like how there are no discouraging questions about user growth or how to make money. Those questions are very boring to me. At hackathon demos, I just get to see a barrage of things that didn't exist before. Apparently you can give dudes and maybe a couple ladies some computers and they come up with things like Automatic DJ, which uses facial recognition to adjust a playlist based on who is in the room. Isn’t that magical? Ben Gleitzman is a magician!

Anyway, New York’s tech scene has a lot of highly-visible people who can really develop the shit out of some business, or market a thing, or put some really sick rounded corners on a website, and those people throw parties for themselves all the time. It's cool to get some exposure for the developer community too. There was an article on New York's Music Hack Day in Billboard. How sweet is that? That's not a tech blog! It's a magazine!

You know what else? Foursquare had their own hackathon right before SXSW, which was really smart. Suddenly there were eight million new Foursquare apps, like 4square and 7 Years Ago, and that means more people using Foursquare. They slayed at SXSW. I love Foursquare, by the way! Yesterday I got the Animal House badge!

What could have been the day the music died was instead the day General Assembly (recall: the new, shiny, manicured; okay, we'll just say it,rich, coworking space north of Union Square) felt like a place where New York hackers could make a second home. Maybe we're biased because GA cofounder Adam Pritzker was the first to high-five The Observer on the way in, but concerns that the well-funded community would turn out ersatz seem unfounded.

The organizers also put on a good show for any out-of-town hackers, between the dazzling, collegiate venue and the homegrown APIs from NYC's ExFM, Hunch and Boxee. The weekend was fueled by coffee and pizza and salad and Pop Chips—too many hacker snacks to list here, really—and many exhausted programmers discovered for the first time how comfy those Swiss couches can be.

"Best hack event I've been to yet," said Marak Squires, cofounder of GA resident Nodejitsu. "The accommodations were awesome, they had ample everything, there were no problems with anything, and our hack just magically worked despite logic or reason or time constraints." By "accommodations," he was referring to the couches as well as the food, beer, desks and audio gear provided by GA and the event's sponsors.

But on to the hacks. It took more than two-and-a-half hours to get through them, and they were overwhelmingly good. Seventy-two viable products ranged from the useful—djtxt, which lets guests control the music via text message—to the useless but delightful—Screaminator: you scream into your iPhone and it gives you a grade and publishes the audio online—to the elegant: an invisible violin played with two iPhones, which won the popular vote. (Londoner Matthew Ogle's observation, "YOU GUYS HE MADE AN INVISIBLE VIOLIN," was one of the event's most-retweeted.)

Mr. Squires demo'ed JSONloops, a web-based app for real-time collaborative beatmaking. There was also TweetsOnBeats, where a robotic voice reads tweets tagged with #tweetbeats over a musical beat. There was AutomaticDJ, which uses facial recognition to identify party guests who have their picture taken when they arrive, then uses Facebook to find out their tastes and changes the music accordingly. There was Find You Some Vinyl, which aggregates search across multiple sites that sell records. Hunch CTO Matt Gattis demo'ed Bionic DJ, which lets users control sound with body movements using Microsoft's Kinect technology.

And there were dozens more. "I was here all weekend and had no idea there were so many," organizer John Britton said on Twitter. There were also many more dozens of people who wanted to watch the livestream; only 100 were allowed, 375 were waitlisted.

But by the time demos concluded, around 6:30, the hackers were ready to grab backpacks and head home to end the long weekend by watching the Grammys, from their own couches.

ajeffries [at] observer.com | @adrjeffries