Music as Software

Ben Bashford
1 min readMar 16, 2016

Kanye has just released an update to his latest album, The Life of Pablo. Tidal subscribers will find a new finished version of Wolves and the outro by Frank Ocean is now its own track, called Frank’s Track.

This is in fact the second “update” to the album since its launch; and it’s just dawned on me that he’s treating it a bit like software. When your music is stored on a server to be streamed of course you can patch it and update it like a developer would do an app, a plug-in or a blogger might edit a post. You can react to feedback from your audience like a new kind of asynchronous performance. It figures that you could even A/B or multivariate test different versions to hone it.

What if…

Adapted from Adobe Creative Cloud

Thinking about music as software is interesting. Huh.

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Ben Bashford

Inventor/Designer focussed on the connected future of software, places, people and culture. Making internet things since '95. Opinions mostly my own.