Just a few stops on Berlin’s U-Bahn separate some of the world’s biggest and most important music technology companies: Native Instruments, Beatport, Ableton, Soundcloud and its neighbour startups Skoove, LANDR and Endel. But how did the German capital become the heart of a global industry?
“Before the tech came the music,” says Heiko Hoffmann, director of artist relations at Beatport, an online record store for electronic music. For a long time he was editor-in-chief of German electronic music magazine Groove and an avid clubber. Like many in senior positions in the industry, he has a long and personal history with the music culture of Berlin.
Hoffmann looks out from the company’s Kreuzberg headquarters, across the river Spree, where the remains of the wall that used to separate the city stand. “Until the wall came down, this was actually the least desirable area of West Berlin,” he says. “Then a lot of clubs started happening in industrial buildings and warehouses. It was literally the cheapest rent that you could get in West Berlin.”
It’s a ten-minute stroll from Beatport to Native Instruments, which launched in 1996, building-software based synthesisers before pioneering DJ tools such as Traktor. Within this radius are dozens of clubs that over the past 30 years have helped to create the conditions for what is affectionately referred to as "Silicon Allee".
"After the wall came down there was an unprecedented sense of creative possibility that, when combined with the emerging technical advances of the time, led to entirely new trends in music, technology, design and art,” says Daniel Haver, co-founder and CEO of Native Instruments. “It was this sense of creative possibility that led us to launch Native in Berlin.”
West Germany's software industry was already developing by the late 1980s. Jan Bohl, CFO of Ableton – a widely used music production package – points to Steinberg (which launched digital audio workstation Cubase in 1989) in Hamburg, and Emagic, based in Rellingen (and sold to Apple in 2002). Bohl, a Hamburg native, arrived as a student in West Berlin in the pre-reunification 80s, when creative people were drawn to the city by the carrot of military service exemption. “The technology aspect of music tech was already represented, but more in West Germany. It shifted towards Berlin when the wall came down,” he says.
Through the 1990s, Berlin’s scene developed in relative isolation. But that all changed in April 2004, with the arrival of a certain budget airline. “I remember when EasyJet started their services to Berlin,” Bohl says. “That was when this became a lifestyle thing of going clubbing in Berlin for a weekend.”
The influx of new visitors had a huge impact, says Hoffmann. It brought software engineers, attracted to the city by the cheap rent, clubs, and the opportunity to work with creatives. But venture capital was still scarce, says Eric Wahlforss, who launched audio distribution platform Soundcloud with partner Alexander Ljung in 2007. “Berlin and Germany was known for this copycat culture of taking things that worked in the US and a couple of years later trying to bring them to the European markets,” he says. But the success of Soundcloud and non-music startups such as Zalando and Delivery Hero pushed Berlin to rank third in Europe in terms of investments raised in 2018, behind only London and Paris.
There’s also a sense of collaboration between the companies in the city. Native Instruments was an early investor in Beatport, and suggested the company open an office in Berlin. “People who are DJing with Native Instrument’s Traktor or people who are using Ableton Live, they are all customers from Beatport,” Hoffmann says. “We’re not taking anything away from each other. And a lot of people start working for one company and end up working at another.”
Florian Penge used to run the DJ division at Native before co-founding Skoove, an interactive tool for learning piano. He believes it’s the affordable conditions that the city still offers which have contributed to its status as the home of music tech. “I don't think that there is any other city in the world where you have this combination,” Florian says.
But rising rents now risk pricing out creatives. “The startup business scene keeps growing, but the competition for experienced employees is very high and the infrastructure isn’t keeping up with that growth,” says Tracy Maraj, chief people officer with Native. Berlin’s success as a tech hub has implications for the core values that attracted people to it in the first place.
But the city’s thriving music industry is still alive, and driving innovation. “As a manufacturer of software instruments of any kind you need the response from the most demanding and most future-looking musicians that actually make use of these sounds,” says Haver.
“Creating electronic music is one thing, playing it out and really checking on the actual crowd and how it's resonating with the people is a very important feedback loop. Berlin is still providing an environment where you have the artists that actually create the music, the manufacturers that provide those sounds, and then an audience that is able to listen and experience this music in the appropriate context.”
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
