Mike McCready is an American entrepreneur in the music industry, CEO of

Music Xray Music Xray is a music tech company based in New York City. The company's official name is Platinum Blue Music Intelligence Inc but it began operating under the name "Music Xray" in July 2009. The company is billed as "an online platform where art ...

, a blogger on

Huffington Post ''HuffPost'' (formerly ''The Huffington Post'' until 2017 and sometimes abbreviated ''HuffPo'') is an American progressive news website, with localized and international editions. The site offers news, satire, blogs, and original content, and ...

and musician.

Career

McCready is most known for having pioneered the science of hit song prediction known as

Hit Song Science Hit Song Science is a term coined by Mike McCready and trademarked by the company he co-founded, Polyphonic HMI. It concerns the possibility of predicting whether a song will be a hit, before its distribution using automated means such as machine l ...

using acoustic analysis software to analyze the underlying mathematical patterns in music. The challenges his company faced in bringing the technology to market were later documented in a Harvard Business School case study penned by

Anita Elberse Anita Elberse is a Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School, specializing in the entertainment, media and sports sectors. Trained as an economist and econometrician, according to ''The Wall Street Journal'', she "takes the ...

titled

Polyphonic HMI Polyphonic HMI is a music analysis company jointly founded in Barcelona, Spain by Mike McCready and an artificial intelligence firm called Grupo AIA. Its principal product is called "Hit Song Science" (HSS) which uses various statistical and signal ...

: Mixing Music and Math. McCready's work with

worked its way briefly into the public consciousness in the first decade of the 2000s, earning him high-profile media attention including features in ''

The New York Times Magazine ''The New York Times Magazine'' is an American Sunday magazine Supplement (publishing), supplement included with the Sunday edition of ''The New York Times''. It features articles longer than those typically in the newspaper and has attracted man ...

'',

The Guardian ''The Guardian'' is a British daily newspaper. It was founded in 1821 as ''The Manchester Guardian'', and changed its name in 1959. Along with its sister papers ''The Observer'' and ''The Guardian Weekly'', ''The Guardian'' is part of the Gu ...

, ''

Le Monde ''Le Monde'' (; ) is a French daily afternoon newspaper. It is the main publication of Le Monde Group and reported an average circulation of 323,039 copies per issue in 2009, about 40,000 of which were sold abroad. It has had its own website si ...

'', and a piece by Malcolm Gladwell in ''

The New Yorker ''The New Yorker'' is an American weekly magazine featuring journalism, commentary, criticism, essays, fiction, satire, cartoons, and poetry. Founded as a weekly in 1925, the magazine is published 47 times annually, with five of these issues ...

''. He was additionally included in several documentaries by

National Geographic Television National Geographic (formerly National Geographic Channel; abbreviated and trademarked as Nat Geo or Nat Geo TV) is an American pay television network and flagship channel owned by the National Geographic Global Networks unit of Disney General En ...

Discovery Channel Discovery Channel (known as The Discovery Channel from 1985 to 1995, and often referred to as simply Discovery) is an American cable channel owned by Warner Bros. Discovery, a publicly traded company run by CEO David Zaslav. , Discovery Channe ...

ITV ITV or iTV may refer to: ITV *Independent Television (ITV), a British television network, consisting of: ** ITV (TV network), a free-to-air national commercial television network covering the United Kingdom, the Isle of Man, and the Channel Islan ...

and Hit Song Science became the inspiration for the plot of an episode of the CBS drama Numb3rs. He was the subject of a supposed investment by one of the characters in

Aaron Sorkin Aaron Benjamin Sorkin (born June 9, 1961) is an American playwright, screenwriter and film director. Born in New York City, he developed a passion for writing at an early age. Sorkin has earned an Academy Award, a BAFTA Award, five Primetime E ...

's short-lived series, Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip. He started his career in Barcelona, Spain as a musician where he released one album under independent record label, DiscMedi, which garnered two charting songs performed in

Catalan Catalan may refer to: Catalonia From, or related to Catalonia: * Catalan language, a Romance language * Catalans, an ethnic group formed by the people from, or with origins in, Northern or southern Catalonia Places * 13178 Catalan, asteroid #1 ...

. Previously, he had pioneered a company that made clocks and watches depicting the way Catalans tell time. They caught on and the company achieved extensive regional media coverage, earning McCready local celebrity status as a creative entrepreneur - especially as a conflict with a larger watch maker erupted in the press over the intellectual property of the clocks. McCready persuaded Catalan celebrities to implicitly endorse his brand by creating their own dial designs which were sold as limited edition wrist watches, each one generating a new surge of media attention. The maneuver resulted in the larger watch maker over-extending itself and eventually closing its doors. The story was chronicled in 1996 in ''

Success Success is the state or condition of meeting a defined range of expectations. It may be viewed as the opposite of failure. The criteria for success depend on context, and may be relative to a particular observer or belief system. One person mig ...

'' magazine.

References

External links

MikeMcCready.comHuffington Post profile
{{DEFAULTSORT:McCready, Mike 1968 births Living people American male musicians American bloggers People from Ord, Nebraska American male bloggers Creighton University alumni