Among other things, we’re proud to announce even more excitement stuff for upcoming Music & Bits. We’re also very happy to now have Vodafone as sponsor of the event. With their support, we’re able to make this event even better than it already was – more on this later…

STEIM will give a hardware demonstration and will be present during Music and Bits the rest of the day to aid participants in their hacking endaevours. Also, TU-Eindhoven will be there to give a demonstration of one of their projects called Jukebugs. These smart, light- and motion sensitive music players introduce a novel way of interacting with large digital music collections, implementing a music search and recommendation engine in a physical product.

To strengthen the Music Hack Day even more, Marc Boon will also attend as a tech-coach to help all hardware hackers. He’s an expert on arduino, RFID and a couple of programming languages you might be interested in.

Check out the updated program and make sure you’ve signed up before attending the event. This is very important because there are only a limited amount of tickets available and people are signing up fast.

Last but not least, we’re happy to announce another speaker at the second edition of Music & Bits! Proud to confirm another influential company, who certainly still has a big role in defining the online music landscape. Last.fm turns seven years old this month. Matthew Ogle, Head of Web Product, will give his insight on how Last.fm has grown and evolved despite the challenges faced by online music services in 2009. He’ll touch on lessons learnt along the way, what’s happening at London HQ, and give a sneak preview of some future features and applications. Designers and developers, bring your scrobbling love; Matt will be joined in Amsterdam by Hannah Donovan (Creative Director), and Jonty Wareing (API Developer).

Rumour has it that Hannah will team up with Anthony from Hypemachine to give us some insight on how design plays a far bigger role in the development of successful music platforms.

Stay tuned, more on this later!

Yes, as announced earlier, we are announcing another round of speakers. And we like to give a big ‘thank you’ for all the people who are in one way or another contributing to the event including Twones, Soundcloud, The Echo Nest, Muxtape, The Music Hack Day team, 40rovers.net, Songkick, Hype Machine, RjDj and of course the Amsterdam Dance Event – who make this event possible. Thanks a lot.

If you haven’t registered yet, please do so now, because we have just added the next speakers to the list and there is only room for a limited amount of attendees / participants. Also, we are still looking for sponsors.

Anthony Volodkin from The Hype Machine. To put it simply, the Hype Machine keeps track of what music bloggers write about. Anthony created Hypem in 2005 and the music service is still going strong with more than 1 million users every month. We are happy to be able to invite Anthony to Amsterdam to talk about his thoughts on music and technology.

Eric Wahlforss from Soundcloud will also be on stage during the upcoming Music and Bits. While the other co-founder, Alex Ljung was on stage last time, Eric will have an entire different role this time. We asked him to do an interview with a (famous) artist who uses Soundcloud. Prepare your questions for Eric and the DJ (yes, it’s a dj) because this will be a very interactive session. More info soon.

Check out the speakers page for more info on the speakers.

Maybe, just maybe (depending on the budget we have), we can invite more speakers – so get in contact with us to support us. And don’t forgot to register.

Some weeks have passed without any notice but a lot has changed. We did our own little re-branding with a new logo and we have been talking to a lot of people who we would like to see on stage. Also, we are now officially hosting a Music Hack Day (on the same day). If you want to be part of Music & Bits as an attendee or a developer , please register here and start spreading the word…!

The first speakers we can confirm are:

- Justin Ouellette from Muxtape. Wired described his service quite accurate: ‘Muxtape, a simple tool for uploading and sharing MP3 mixes with a cassette theme, emerged seemingly out of nowhere to give us a great way to share mixes online in the simplest way possible’. While the API is still under construction, Justin will explain the role of design and music on the web. Also, hopefully we learn a little bit more about what the new Muxtape will look like in the future.

- Brian Whitman, founder and CTO of The Echo Nest. ‘The Echo Nest is a company that’s bringing machine listening to Web 2.0′, according to TechCrunch. We can wholeheartedly agree so we are happy to invite Brian over to Amsterdam to have a talk about this service. Either if you are a fan, a musician or a developer, Brian’s talk on music data, search and synthesis will be interesting for everyone. What can data do for you? A note for developers: Brian will also be supporting the Music Hack Day track.

- RjDj. There will be at least (but maybe more) two people from RjDj who will be having a talk and joining the conversation at Music & Bits. If you don’t know why we are so excited to welcome RjDj, make sure you check out their iPhone app and the unique music experience they want to create here. It will be interesting to see what RjDj brings to the Music & Bits conference, but chances are big it will be mind-blowing, like always.

A big thanks to Dave Haynes from Soundcloud, who will be moderating the Music Hack Day in Amsterdam and thanks for everyone else who is helping us to make this a great event. More speakers will be announced very soon and we hope to fill a nice goody bag for you too. At the moment, we are still in the search of some small sponsors who can help us compensate for the costs we make, so please contact us about that if you can help us.

By the way, if you are in or around Berlin this week, check out the Berlin Music Hack Day. Hope to see you there and don’t forget to REGISTER for Music & Bits Amsterdam first…! haha

Good news! On October the 21st, we are teaming up with Amsterdam Dance Event to organize the second Music & Bits. Since Amsterdam Dance Event attracts more than 2.000 professionals from 43 countries, we think this will offer some pretty interesting opportunities for both parties (and you!). While A.D.E. is primarily focused on the electronic music industry and the creative industry, Music & Bits will focus on trends and opportunities due to the latest developments in the online music world. We expect 250-300 visitors, people from the music industry, entrepreneurs, bloggers, press, developers, hackers and music enthusiasts.

The program of Music & Bits will consist of two tracks. One is a conference-track with international speakers and online music start-ups and the other is a Music Hack Day for soft- and hardware developers. We’d like to call this “a jam session for developers”. Check out more info on previous helt Music Hack Days here.

If you want to contribute in any way, please contact us here. Also, we’re still looking for sponsorships, so get in touch with us if you can help us out.

More information on both tracks, locations, speakers and additional information can be found here soon. Again, this will be a free event held in Amsterdam. Stay tuned for a sign-up form and follow Music & Bits and Music Hack Day on Twitter.

It’s a wrap! The first Music & Bits was a great succes and we got a lot of feedback for organizing a next Music & Bits…! We have a lot of ideas and we are open for comments, hate mails, suggestions or other ramblings. Drop us a line at contact (at) musicandbits (dot) com – and enjoy the video Kamiel Blom made: