Teh hype around music-industry hackathons may ebb adn flow, but they remain an enduring source of good ideas.
It’s not about finding fully-fledged startups ready to soar, and more about exploring how new technologies put together in interesting ways can solve problems and/or open new pathways.
Asset relationship-management tech firm OpenPlay held its first hackathon last month during the Music biz conference in Atlanta. The ‘Break the Silos. Build the Future’ event focused on four times: social impact, dsps, distributors and sync.
40 people across 12 teams took part, with an array of industry partners providing APIs and datasets: the MLC, Audioshake, Pex, Luminate, Soundstripe, Sureel AI, AWS, Merlin, Musixmatch, Cyanite, Watchdog, Muserk, ACRCloud, Harmix, XPERI, Jaxsta, Unison, Music.AI and OpenPlay itself.
The winning project came from Berlin-based student Diego Leon, who built an app for AI-powered rights attribution.
It analyses the audio of a song, using Audioshake’s API to separate stems then Sureel’s API to detect patterns and assign attribution so that accurate royalties can be paid.
Second place went to two staff from the MLC – Serona Elton and Katrina Feyintola. They tapped into a very-2025 trend – ‘vibe coding’ courtesy of a platform called Lovable – to build a project called Samplify.
It identifies and generates metadata for sampled elements in songs, with the aim of making attribution quicker and more accessible.
Third place, meanwhile, went to participant Jake Hardy with an app called Field Notes.
It helps people take structured notes during meetings and sessions, tagging them with contextual metadata like artist names, genres and dates. As his follow-up blog post explains, Hardy also used vibe coding to build his project.
He suggested that there may be some tensions around use of these tools. “I think we’ll see a fracture. The growing hostility towards vibe coding amongst traditional developers is obvious,” wrote Hardy, who thinks events may split between ‘AI-free hackathons’ and more casual and accessible vibe-coding contests.
openplay’s co-founder and chief client officer Edward Ginis thinks that the emergence of vibe coding is positive for the music industry, however.
“The most profound lesson was how AI has democratised innovation in ways I completely underestimated. Watching participants use AI-powered advancement tools to rapidly prototype ideas shifted my entire outlook on who can be an innovator in music technology,” he told Music Ally.
“The trend I observed was participants focusing on rapid ideation and experimentation rather than getting bogged down in technical implementation details.”
“This ‘vibe coding’ approach meant ideas could flow from anyone – music supervisors, A&R executives, artist managers – not just traditional developers.the fact that two winners weren’t software developers proved that domain expertise and creative problem-solving often matter more than pure technical skills.”
Ginis thinks that there’s a wider lesson to be learned here to: that if the music industry has an innovation bottleneck, it’s less a lack of ideas than “accessibility to the tools needed to build solutions”.
He thinks AI can remove that barrier: “which means we’re about to see an explosion of music-focused innovation from unexpected sources… future music industry hackathons should actively recruit non-technical participants and provide AI-powered development tools as standard resources”.
Ginis added that his aim with the hackathon was to prove that there is still an appetite for these kinds of events and this type of collaboration within the music community.
“My expectations were modest – I wasn’t sure if we’d get enough technical talent to make the projects viable, and I was worried that the music industry’s risk-averse culture might limit participation,” he said.
“But we ended up with nearly 40 participants forming 12 teams, and we were blessed to have the invaluable support of an notable coalition of industry-leading sponsors, who contributed APIs, datasets, and hands-on guidance to help the teams succeed. It was a success!”
