Home Music Recommendation Services Need More Than the Wisdom of Crowds

Music Recommendation Services Need More Than the Wisdom of Crowds

Recommendation engines will often rely on the wisdom of crowds to suggest music. But there are a lot more ways that can be used to determine what music a person may like.

Paul Lamere writes a lot on this topic. He’s a former researcher at Sun Labs where he explored ways to organize, search for and discover music. He’s the author of Music Machinery, one of the best blogs out there about music and technology. Lamere now works at Echo Nest where he manages the company’s developer community. Echo Nest is a music intelligence company founded by Tristan Jehan and Brian Whitman, who met at the MIT Media Lab while pursuing their doctorates in music understanding and synthesis research.

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The wisdom of crowds should not be discounted. It plays a role in how recommendation services work. But it’s the practice of stitching together multiple data sources that can find results that give you music you would not ordinarily discover.

Lamere is critical of music recommendation services. In February, he wrote a post called the

Sixth Beatle

. He used it to demonstrate how the wisdom of crowds really does not help people discover new music.

Lamere starts with recommendation services for the Beatles. Most services will recommend John Lennon, Paul McCarthy, The Who, Pink Floyd and other similar artists. True, these are reasonable recommendations but they do not exactly help find new music.

Lamere explains The Beatles are tremendously popular so they tend to get paired with other popular artists. The result: The recommender doesn’t tell you anything you don’t know. If the service looks for similar sounding music, the results won’t help you either. Queen, The Rolling Stones… again, you’ve heard of these bands.

A different approach calls for a recommendation engine, such as what Echo Nest develops, to call on a variety of sources such as music blogs, Wikipedia entries, tags, review, profile pages, news, audio or video – the list goes on.

What ends up being recommended is a lot different than what you get when just relying on the wisdom of crowds. Echo Net recommended The Beau Brummels, The Dukes of Stratosphear, Flamin’ Groovies and Emmit Rhodes.

And so Lamere asks this question: Could Emmit Rhodes be the sixth Beatle? Take a listen.

I’d say that’s a pretty decent recommendation.

The wisdom of crowds should not be discounted. It plays a role in how recommendation services work. But it’s the practice of stitching together multiple data sources that can find results that give you music you would not ordinarily discover.

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