Balance, Technology November 17, 2010

The Playlist: Music and Tech Veteran James Lynch III

To say that music and technology have guided the career of James Lynch III is putting it mildly (read his extensive bio here). Now the Chief Technology Officer at ecoReserve.org, he’s working to help protect endangered land—all while listening to a library of music that’s almost 14,000 songs strong. Here’s a list of tunes that recently showed up after he hit “shuffle.”

What do you listen to while you work? Although I will occasionally listen to entire albums, I usually put my 13.5K song collection on random.

How do you listen? Through Bose speakers or with my headphones on.

Do you have any favorite music websites/providers? I have feeds from a ton of music blogs coming into Google Reader, and I hear about new releases from them, and from friends of mine. I used to share office space with The Rights Workshop, a music-supervision and licensing company, and discovered a lot of new music through Brooke Wentz and her team.

Does music influence your work? Before ecoReserve, I worked as software architect for Creative Allies, a startup that enables musicians to post jobs for creative content (CD covers, t-shirts, etc.) and have their fans compete to create the piece chosen by the musician. The team behind the project was made up of music business veterans as well as younger folks, and we all wound up listening to a lot of music by the artists involved in our initial launch. This is an example of the opposite of what you’re asking… for years, my work has influenced the music I’ve heard, rather than the opposite.

Where do you find music recommendations? Who influences your musical taste? I use SonicLiving.com to find out about gigs that interest me. Having spent years in and around the “music biz” such as it is, there are friends whose taste I trust implicitly (Cerentha being one of them!), and I always check out anything they send my way. I probably recommend more music to friends than they recommend to me.

If your work was a song or a musician, what or who would it be? What a question!!! Hmm. ecoReserve, my current project, allows people to create their own nature preserves for as little as $25… so it would be something connected to nature—maybe Peter Gabriel, something apocalyptic: “Here Comes the Flood.” When I had my prepress company in New York, things ran at an insane pace… perhaps “Burning Down the House” by Talking Heads.