[2][3] Method Music is an outgrowth of Townshend's groundbreaking 1971 futurist composition Lifehouse.

Although Townshend originally intended Lifehouse as a multimedia audience-participation musical production to follow The Who's Tommy, difficulties in implementing the project led to its temporary abandonment; a selection of constituent components extracted from Lifehouse were recorded and assembled as The Who's highly successful album Who's Next.

The idea of a musical portraiture system was first explored by Townshend in the lead-off cut on Who's Next, Baba O'Riley - a piece echoed in Meher Baba Piece, the first track on Method Music (which was included on The Who's 2006 album Endless Wire as the underpinning for Fragments, co-written by Ball).

[5] In 2007, Townshend launched The Lifehouse Method website, run by his company Eel Pie, an online music portraiture system created with Ball and programmer Dave Snowdon in which users entered data into the system and received a unique, customized piece of audio.

Method Music was recorded and mixed at Townshend's Oceanic Studios in Twickenham.