Max Engel: a Blog

My Latest Move

Short version: I’ve left the BBC and am now working for Buzzmedia where I’m leading up product development for SPIN Magazine. If you want the long version dotted with personal anecdotes and rambling thoughts and theories, read on.

Long version: Growing up, I had a wall in my bedroom where I mounted all of the ticket stubs from every show I ever went to. It was a sun-faded story of the development of my music taste, and when my parents moved out of that house, we had the wall removed to save that bit of personal history.

Music is something that is both deeply personal and highly exhibitionist. I remember the joy of making mixtapes each summer before I went away to camp, working to craft the perfect expressions of my individual taste to share with and show off to my friends. However, I also remember the first time I was angry to find out that someone I knew was into a hidden gem of a band that I liked, because I felt that they had violated my sense of identity. This is the complex duality of music: it is both the secret embrace we listen to when hidden in our rooms and the self-empowered declaration of identity we blare from our cars.

I was lucky enough to grow up during a time when music was irreversably transformed. My own museum of audio technology is littered with cassettes (including the Pocket Rocker), CD’s, vinyl, minidiscs, and a bevy of MP3 players. I remember finding music on Hotline, FTP’s, Napster, and the barrage of P2P services that bursted during my college years.

Now, as someone who has found myself working in technology, I’m always looking for ways to blend my passions with my occupations. Most recently it brought me to the BBC, where I was lucky enough to work with an amazing team of people building games for shows I love, properties like Doctor Who and Top Gear. However, an opportunity recently came up that I couldn’t pass over.

I’ve joined Buzzmedia to handle product development for the recently-acquired SPIN Magazine, and it is a real honor to work with a brand I’ve admired for a long time. While the music industry is certainly experiencing an unprecedented amount of volatility, the opportunity to work with such a storied publication and be a part of the process of reshaping the discussion, discovery, and consumption of music was something I couldn’t let pass me by.

So yet again, here I am writing another entry explaining my next career move. I certainly have made a lot of job switches over the past six years, and I think I’ve found an industry that is moving as fast as I like to.