On the 10th anniversary of The Infinite Jukebox, creator Paul Lamere reflects

Paul Lamere founded The Echo Nest, arguably the first music intelligence platform, which Spotify acquired way back in 2014. Paul still ‘builds stuff’ for Spotify, but 10 years ago, at an MIT Music Hack Day, he created The Infinite Jukebox.

by Paul Lamere. He shares his thoughts at Music Machinery on Substack

Ten years ago, at the Boston Music Hack Day held at the MIT, I built the Infinite Jukebox – a hack that takes (almost) any song and makes it last (nearly) forever. The hack made use of the Echo Nest audio analysis to identify parts of the song that were self similar and automatically created looping points that the engine could use to play an every changing and never ending version of the song. The jukebox included a nifty visualization that would animate as the song was playing back.

The Infinite Jukebox was quite popular, making it to the top of Reddit and Hacker News (which of course, triggered the OMFG how do I keep this running with so much traffic), Wired magazine, cited in dozens of research articles and it even won an Information is Beautiful design award.

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I built an iOS version of the Infinite Jukebox too, but I realized that the music licensing would be too big of a challenge and I’d never be able to release it in the app store. A video of the iOS version lives on as a record of this effort.

Eventually, the corporate lawyers got a little too nervous about all that uploaded content being served and the machines hosting the system were shutdown.

However, that wasn’t the end of the Infinite Jukebox. An enterprising developer: Izzy Dahanela made her own hack on top of mine. To make it work without using uploaded content, she matches up the Echo Nest / Spotify music analysis with the corresponding song on YouTube. She hosts this at eternalbox.dev. It runs just as well as it ever did, 10 years later. 

Today Infinite Jukebox seems as popular as ever. It periodically has moments on TikTok (Jukebox TikToks have a 100 million views 😉 like these:

https://www.tiktok.com/@yahoo_answers?is_from_webapp=1&sender_device=pc

Ten years later, it is great to see that the Infinite Jukebox is still being used and enjoyed. Thanks to undermybrella for making it eternal. Hoping it will still be alive in 2032.

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