Music Discovery Systems

Music Discovery Systems

Background

Chris Dahlen [1]

"Take a minute and think about your 10 favorite albums of all time. How did you discover them? Maybe you made an impulse buy at the record store counter, or you found a tape in a rental car. But it's more likely that you heard most of them through your friends, or a glowing review in a magazine, or catching a hit on the radio, or because you were already following the catalog of a producer or label or artist. In other words, you got a recommendation. If you had the time, you could work your way through your record collection and explain how you made each purchase.

So how about predicting what you'll do next? Since the mid-1990s, online music recommendation or music discovery tools have studied our tastes and told us what to buy. And in the past year, several startups have launched with new, more ambitious software that someday may understand us better than we know ourselves.

The idea that a computer could judge music, let alone recommend it, strikes some as repugnant; yet many customers are drawn to the idea of finding records thanks to the Web's promise of perfect information. In the same way that your one true love could be working at a bank in Santa Fe, and the two of you may never meet, there are bands out there that would become your lifetime favorites-- if only someone would hand them to you." (http://www.pitchforkmedia.com/features/weekly/06-05-22-better-than-we-know-ourselves.shtml)

More Information

This article by Chris Dahlen at Pitchfork is a thorough overview of the history, present and future of music recommendation systems.

URL = http://www.pitchforkmedia.com/features/weekly/06-05-22-better-than-we-know-ourselves.shtml