Jean-Michel Jarre
Composer, performer, producer. Visionary, innovator, cultural ambassador. Any list of Jean-Michel Jarre’s countless factettes would inevitably come short of his actual significance in music history. “JMJ” is a living legend and often referred to as the “Godfather of Electronic Music”. When Jarre launched his landmark- debut album “OXYGENE” in 1976, he opened a new chapter in music history. The record has sold over 18 million copies and laid the foundations for his exceptional career. Jarre’s pioneering work gave birth to a veritable cult and the fastest-growing trend the music industry has ever stood to witness: the rise of electronic music.
Introduction
In yearly 2021, Jean-Michel Jarre worked on a new album called Amazōnia – an audio experience with sounds from the The Amazonas. The album was mastered in normal stereo, but a special version of the album was mastered in Binaural audio, which creates a 3D stereo sound sensation for the listener. Jean-Michel wanted this version to be available as a digital download for people who bought the album, amongst other tracks that was not included on the album.
Claus Lundholm, who is one of the co-founders of SODA, was already working close with Jean-Michel on an app that generates music on the fly using AI. The app is called Eōn. Therefore it was obvious for these two to develop a solution for music sharing.
What was the challenge?
Claus searched the internet for a platform to host digital audio files. The platform needed to have a mechanism to lock down the access to the music files, that would limit access to people with an actual code. No results came up, and Claus build a custom made one time solution to Jarre’s official website.
Quickly, a few challenges came to surface:
- no file protection
- no real monitoring of code usage
- no real CDN provisioning of the digital files
- no backup and validation of codes
- + more…
With the next album release ‘Welcome To The Other Side’ from Jarre, the need for a dedicated platform was obvious.
SODA solves the problem
Claus Lundholm teams up with Claus Jacobsen, Solution Architect and Klavs Wismann, Developer, and they begin designing a new platform from scratch. The platform needs to be able to solve many of the issues and missing features and functions + have a way to store data securely.
The future of digital music distribution
The future will bring more challenges. New ways of distributing digital music are emerging on daily basis. For SODA and Jean-Michel Jarre it means we will continue the innovation and exploration of new ways to accessing valuable music for the consumer on digital devices.
Jean-Michel Jarre is a creative contributor to SODA in regards to the development of ideas and features.
