Orange Spain, a mobile operator, has two new music services – ‘New Talents’ and ‘Enjoy your Music’. Both are
powered by Music Intelligence Solutions, a
provider of AI (artificial intelligence) software for music recommendation and
discovery.
Music Intelligence Solutions is an intriguing company. It was founded in 2002 and
is based in Spain and the US West Coast. They describe themselves as “a diverse group of
musicians and mathematicians”. Their customers range from record labels, to radio
stations, to musicians and artists, to MP3 Player Manufacturers, to Music Retailers, to
mobile operators. So they cover the whole spectrum of the music industry, which is
unusual in a service provider.
Hit Potential
Their Hit Song Science technology aims to
predict music chart success. It “overlays musical analysis with commercial data such as
sales, highest chart position, and release date.” On their website aimed at music artists
and producers, the technology is being promoted as a way to analyze the “hit potential”
of music. You can read more about the technology here, plus The Guardian ran a good story
about it back in January 2005.
In terms of how it is related to the Web, it is very
similar to internet radio service Pandora – which
analyzes music patterns, via software from The Music Genome Project.
The Orange “New Talents” service uses Hit Song Science. The idea is to allow independent artists to upload their new music onto the Orange website, providing them
with a hit potential rating free of charge.
Recommendations
MI Universe technology,
which powers Orange’s ‘Enjoy your Music’ service, is about giving music recommendations to users. It
has two aspects to it – “soundalikes” and the “music taste test”. The aim is to match
up music with “the user’s music personality”.
How does this work? It uses a clustering engine to find music
patterns (including a “methodology for detecting social trends”) and a recommendation
engine to do the matching with peoples tastes. This technology is being aimed at online
music retailers, in-store terminals and mobile services. Here’s how
it’s being used in the ‘Enjoy your music’ part of the new Orange Spain services:
“…when an Orange customer is browsing music on his phone or on the Orange website,
he can click on a track he likes to generate “more like this”. The
recommendation will be presented as a list on his phone, or graphically as a
“mini-constellation” on the website. The customer will be presented with
tracks from mainstream artists, plus tracks with a high success potential rating from
independent artists, all of which he or she can sample and download. The tracks presented
will have a high degree of sonic similarity with the initial track, and a strong
correlation with the customers musical tastes.”
Summary
You can see the potential of music analysis software to power music services on the
Web – for clustering, social patterns, user recommendations, personalization, and so on. Pandora is
already proving it and these new services by Orange in Spain bring the experience to the
mobile Web world. I’m expecting this to be a ripe area for growth in online music
services – and also, in time, tv and video on the Web.
