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As the article notes, Gracenote currently has 50 million tracks in their database, while current online offerings aspire to a mere 1.5 million songs. Clearly there is room for improvement.

However, one issue that the article doesn't address is how users might navigate the so-called "celestial jukebox". A large catalogue may be useful if one specifically knows the artist/album/song one is looking for, but browsing a catalogue such as Gracenote is impractical (especially since music can be relatively difficult to classify). I believe that personalisation will play a major role here - I'm still waiting for a comprehensive online service that provides recommendations on a par with those provided by Audioscrobbler. The iTunes store is very weak in this area, while Yahoo seems to have invested significant effort into this area (in terms of technology, it ties in nicely with their search personalisation). It will be interesting to see how important this aspect of the buying experience becomes as the depth of their respective catalogues increases.

Thats why there are recommendation services. You find one band that you like and you get recommendations for tens or hundreds of others. As a simple example, chances are you go to Amazon.com and type in thier name and pull up thier albums you get a list of "People that bought this, also bought ...". It is a good starting point.

Hell, running a music type of website like you do (assumed so, by the link in your profile), you have probably heard of audioscrobbler.com which is a way to automatically see hundreds (thousands!) of artists, albums and songs that you would like if you could just seed it with one (maybe two) bands that you like, and see what everyone else with your same musical taste (they are out there) is listening to. I am sure that there are plenty of other websites with the same recommendation services, but thats the one that I use.

Which is why services like Audioscrobbler are much better for music recommendations. It recommends music to you based on the listening habits of other users that listen to similar music as you.

Audioscrobbler's http://www.audioscrobbler.com/ latest plugin count has Winamap beating iTunes by almost 3:1. Here's the most recent count, if you're interested. http://www.audioscrobbler.com/development/graphs.p hp

Audioscrobbler's http://www.audioscrobbler.com/ latest plugin count has Winamap beating iTunes by almost 3:1. Here's the most recent count, if you're interested. http://www.audioscrobbler.com/development/graphs.p hp

The pro of this system is that their recomendations are based in what you really hear. It won't count that bad albums you have in your hd but just heard once.

The problem is that it looks like they don't have a very smart algorithm for discovering music. I'm starting to build my musical profile and they just recommended me famous musicians. What is really fun is to browse your network of people with similar tastes.

I alson believe they are having some problems with their servers, since some features, like the group charts, aren't working.

I'm not affiliated with them, but it is a really cool system.

I think Audioscrobbler works pretty well for this kind of thing. No intrusive 'rating system'. No isolated file downloading network (Gnomoradio, iRate) to divide the potential pool of artists. Just download a plugin and play the music you would play anyway. Go to sites like 3hive for freely available indie tracks and check your recommendations every so often. Simple.

I think Audioscrobbler works pretty well for this kind of thing. No intrusive 'rating system'. No isolated file downloading network (Gnomoradio, iRate) to divide the potential pool of artists. Just download a plugin and play the music you would play anyway. Go to sites like 3hive for freely available indie tracks and check your recommendations every so often. Simple.

I use audioscrobbler to find out what people who like what I like are listening to. then I go to DC++ and download it. piece of cake...

I always thought it was Indie - as in Independent... My favorite music site of the moment is Last.FM. It's a streaming service, and they ask for a small donation, but the beauty of it is that they match your preferences with others who have similar tastes, (using Audioscrobbler )so you can listen to new music that you might not otherwise hear...

Your statement reminds me of the patent commissioner in 1899 saying "Everything that can
be invented has been invented."

But my statement is totally different. I didn't say that no one can make any more good music, it's just that they don't.

You guys might be right: there could be some indie music out there that I'll like. I have looked around some, however, and just haven't found anything that interested me enough to bother buying it. Maybe I'll have to spend some more time looking when I get some free time.

It's not all crap, however; I still like the recent albums by Dream Theater and Iron Maiden (both RIAA-affiliated, unfortunately). But these bands have been around since the 80's and 70's, respectively.

One new way I've found of learning of different bands is to sign up for Audioscrobbler.
I use AmaroK, a media player for KDE, which has Audioscrobbler linkage built-in in the newest release. It sends statistics on everything you play to Audioscrobbler, which builds statistics based on that, and then matches you up with other people who have similar tastes in music. This way, you can look at what your "musical neighbors" listen to, and check out their favorite bands.

However, as for downloading music and listening before buying, I've cut that out lately because of the torrent (pardon the pun) of lawsuits from the RIAA for this activity. I used to do this more 5 years ago and bought new music this way, but not anymore.

Maybe I should spend more time with my notebook computer, using its wireless connection to download P2P material through other people's networks...

music plasma saved my life! it shows a graphical map of artists and how they connect to other artists (in way of "genre"). Its some entirely arbitrary linkage and the breadth isnt that great, but its supposedly all based on user inputs.

i find audioscrobbler to be too over-run by the songs everyone has on their playlist. it doesnt really help you discern genre's, which is what is so great about musicplasma. its much more directly peer to peer, but somewhat less useful. you pretty much have to find well done groups, but even well done groups rarely play the music in the group.

Mood + genre awareness has a long ways to go.

-Myren

In theory, you could use Audioscrobbler to keep track of that information.

You'd need to build something to act on the data collected, but it's an easy start.

I use the audioscrobbler data to realize I'm listening to one group too much and expand my collection. I only have a limited amount of space at work for music, so once I find myself listening to the same thing day in day out, I rip a couple more CD's and keep going. Otherwise I end up getting whole cd's stuck in my head and then I burn out on them.

I agree - a plugin that would make educated guesses about what music you'd like to listen to would be great. just load your whole list into it, and it, after training, would play appropriate music for that day/time of day. Would be very cool in fact. /wishes he could program in more than just ksh

In theory, you could use Audioscrobbler to keep track of that information.

You'd need to build something to act on the data collected, but it's an easy start.

I use the audioscrobbler data to realize I'm listening to one group too much and expand my collection. I only have a limited amount of space at work for music, so once I find myself listening to the same thing day in day out, I rip a couple more CD's and keep going. Otherwise I end up getting whole cd's stuck in my head and then I burn out on them.

I agree - a plugin that would make educated guesses about what music you'd like to listen to would be great. just load your whole list into it, and it, after training, would play appropriate music for that day/time of day. Would be very cool in fact. /wishes he could program in more than just ksh

Go and try Last FM. This one is even better: they team up with AudioScrobbler.

Basically works like this: they keep a play list of all the songs you play through their on-line station, or in your favorite MP3 player. They try to match your play list to other play lists that contain more or less the same songs, and stream that selection to you, so you end up with a stream of music you really like but which you may not know yet.

Works really well in a musical sense, and it is legal, but server wise it is a bumpy ride. Even without slashdot posts this service is an on/off business.

Ah. I'd missed that bit of history. It looks like that one really can be blamed on Microsoft - they absorbed Firefly to use the underlying technology in Passport, and then let the original site die.

Jeff Boulter was the ex-Firefly employee who built LAUNCHCast from the ashes of Firefly. Microsoft might not have given him the opportunity to preserve the original data.

I lost a couple months of productivity plugging my music collection into FireFly, only to have LaunchCast trash all the data when they took over

I share your pain. I had rated many thousands of songs on LAUNCHCast, was subscibed to a dozen other stations, and had quite a few subscribers myself when Yahoo! absorbed them and sucked the life out of it. I would be even more bitter if I had been part of the Firefly community.

I'll be checking out AudioScrobbler - I had pretty much given up on collaborative music rating systems. We'll see whether this one becomes a victim of its own success, too.

I posted it elsewhere in the thread, but you should check out AudioScrobbler. You'll create an account there, download a plug-in for your media player (in your case, iTunes), and configure it. It will automatically submit every song you listen to (assuming you have them tagged right) to the site.

After a few hundred listens (or a bit more, they're adding new hardware soon to speed things up), it'll generate "musical neighbors" for you - a list of people whose musical taste is most like yours. You can browse their top lists to get ideas for music to check out, or look at the "similar artists" pages for the artists you like, which are generated via similar means.

As it's all generated based on what people are actually listening to, instead of crap like "genre" or such, it's of rather good quality.

I've found an incredible amount of new music I like recently due to the site. Almost half of my top list now is stuff I've found in the last few months. It is definitely something to look at.

There's an even easier way to find more music that'll match well what you like.

A pair of web sites: AudioScrobbler and Last.FM.

AudioScrobbler tracks what you listen to (via an unobtrusive plug-in for your media player), then after a few hundred listens, matches you up with other people that have been listening to similar artists. The listening information is also used to generate listings of "similar artists" for each artist on the site. As this is all based on what people actually listen to, instead of "genres" or other stuff, it is remarkably accurate.

Then Last.FM uses this profile generated for you to customize streaming radio just for you. It plays songs that are found in your neighbor's profiles, though you can mark those you really like or dislike to alter what you hear.

It all works together to help you find new music yourself, and influence other peoples' listening habits.

In fact, about half of my top 50 artists are ones that I've discovered over the past few months thanks to the site. That's more new music that I enjoy at once then by any other means ever.

There's an even easier way to find more music that'll match well what you like.

A pair of web sites: AudioScrobbler and Last.FM.

AudioScrobbler tracks what you listen to (via an unobtrusive plug-in for your media player), then after a few hundred listens, matches you up with other people that have been listening to similar artists. The listening information is also used to generate listings of "similar artists" for each artist on the site. As this is all based on what people actually listen to, instead of "genres" or other stuff, it is remarkably accurate.

Then Last.FM uses this profile generated for you to customize streaming radio just for you. It plays songs that are found in your neighbor's profiles, though you can mark those you really like or dislike to alter what you hear.

It all works together to help you find new music yourself, and influence other peoples' listening habits.

In fact, about half of my top 50 artists are ones that I've discovered over the past few months thanks to the site. That's more new music that I enjoy at once then by any other means ever.

Audioscrobbler builds a profile of your musical taste using a plugin for your media player (Winamp, iTunes, XMMS etc..). Plugins send the name of every song you play to the Audioscrobbler server, which updates your musical profile with the new song. Every person with a plugin has their own page on this site which shows their listening statistics. The system automatically matches you to people with a similar music taste, and generates personalised recommendations.

Audioscrobbler builds a profile of your musical taste using a plugin for your media player (Winamp, iTunes, XMMS etc..). Plugins send the name of every song you play to the Audioscrobbler server, which updates your musical profile with the new song. Every person with a plugin has their own page on this site which shows their listening statistics. The system automatically matches you to people with a similar music taste, and generates personalised recommendations.

I guess Audioscrobbler will still be around next year.

That's almost enough to get me to buy a Mac.

Hey, there's nothing wrong with sending information on every song you play somewhere, as long as it's the right place.

One of the things that bothers me about search based networks (bittorrent, eDonkey, Gnutella, Kazaa, napster, etc.) is that you already have to know what you're looking for before you find it. Anything that requires you to type a search query to find a music file is useless as a tool for serendipitous "surfing" that allows you to stumble on new music.

This problem partially undercuts a major argument of file sharing proponents- that file sharing exposes people to music that they wouldn't have considered buying before.

If I can have a "buddy list" of people whose music libraries you can casually browse through, I'll be much more likely to experiment with new music because there'll be less fear of encountering music that 5u><0r5. I understand there is already some filesharing software that offers this functionality, but bundling it with a IM application that people already use heavily and like to leave open as much as possible is a good way to build a user base fast. In fact, I can see Joe User types switching from AIM to GAIM once they find out it has secure file sharing capabilities.

Also, if communities like AudioScrobbler or MusicMobs could be integrated into GAIM, it would extend its use to being a tool for finding people who have similar music interests that you can add to your buddy list.

• Audio Lunchbox
• Magnatune
• Audioscrobbler
• tokyo dawn records

The cool thing also is that the music is right there. There are sites like audioscrobbler where you can see what people like who like what you like, but you can't actually HEAR it.

That's why I like audioscrobbler it loads as a plugin to your favourite media player and creates lists of people with similar interests to your own, you can then view their play lists and find new songs you might never hear of otherwise.

and audio scrobbler.

Hmm, it looks nice, at least in theory, but I haven't gotten it to play anything yet. Every time I add my music directory, it slowly builds up to 100% CPU and then seems to crash. I have only 5000 or so files in that directory (and 3000 on another partition, but I haven't gotten the chance to try to add them yet.) That's not an absurd amount for a normal playlist to handle IMO.

Also it took me a while to see how to add a directory. You have to take te file-browser inside the directory to add it. Kind of counter intuitive.

Shame I can't get it to work, because it's a good idea. Especially if an Audioscrobbler plugin could be written. I'm kind of addicted to having my music listening stats at hand and being able to compare them with others.

Look at the labelels behind every song; each one is a monopoly label. The BBC has always been used to control the taste of the masses, and since Radio Coroline, it has consistently failed.

It will fail again.

Instead of doing the innovative thing and writing its own software toe take the true pulse of what the public (that pays the soon to be axed licence fee) is listening to, or outsourcing the service out from a legitimate company, they act as servants to the music monopoly. This is being done under the direct orders of Dame Pauline Neville Jones, ex head of NatWest and head of the British QinetiQ defense and security group, whose opinions on "the propaganda war" are interesting to say the least.

No matter what bogus, industry promoting chart they produce, they will be hard pressed to put the genie back in the bottle. As broadband spreads throughout the UK people will increasingly turn to free music, and we will see alternative, meaningful, non corporate charts take their place as the centers of attention.

Charts by people like Audioscrobbler are far more representative and are precisely what I am talking about.

Of course, this doesn't take into account if somebody has paid for the track or not, but my guess is that the majority of people using this service are the kind of people who don't (as a rule) pay for music downloads.

AudioScrobbler

All sensible people use Audioscrobbler and get their charts. They take into account what people listen to and not what they buy, meaning that it is less skewed towards teenyboppers and one hit wonders (which have low replay values) and fairer towards good bands.

The audioscrobbler database is available under a creative commons license.
http://www.audioscrobbler.com

Audioscrobbler is a computer system that builds up a detailed profile of your musical taste. After installing an Audioscrobbler Plugin, your computer sends the name of every song you play to the Audioscrobbler Server. With this information, the Audioscrobbler server builds you a 'Musical Profile'. Statistics from your Musical Profile are shown on your Audioscrobbler User Page, available for everyone to view.

People do listen to/buy a lot of older stuff. Actually they mostly listen to Radiohead. Look here or here.

OK, so this is a bit of a shameless plug, but as far as we know, ours is the only chart which actually represents what users are listening to. We were quite interested to see this news in the papers on Tuesday.

The Audioscrobbler Charts show what people are actually listening to - not what they're illegally downloading, not what they're buying, but what they're actually playing.

So yeah, our demographic is quite skewed, and we're having trouble keeping up with current load, but we're working hard on both of those things this summer.

hmmm? http://www.audioscrobbler.com/

Here are some Projects that may be of interest to readers.

Streamer P2P Radio
AudioScrobbler
Last FM

See Music Plasma for an awesome artist relationship display or sign up for an Audioscrobbler account.

• Speed. Though I'm sure many can provide their own anecdotal evidence on how iTunes works fine on their machines, that doesn't invalidate the many, MANY claims of iTunes being a bloated, resource hog (at least on Windows.). Foobar and Winamp with a little tweaking open almost instantaenously, while iTunes lags behind on starting up. Even when minimized, iTunes is taking up far more CPU than a media player should (even more than WMP!).
• MPC/FLAC/SHN/APE/etc. support. If applications like Foobar, Winamp, and QCD can pull it off, why can't iTunes, with it's beefy 19.5 MB download, play simple file formats like these that've been around for years? Wouldn't it work in their favor to allow their users more choice, to let their users listen to their music in whatever format they've chosen to encode them in?
• Queueing. Once again, something included with XMMS, Winamp, and even MMJB. If your listening to a huge random playlist of songs in Winamp, but want to hear a particular song after the one your listening to, just select the song in the playlist and hit 'Q'. Winamp will finish the currently playing song, then play the song you selected, then return to randomly shuffling the tracks automatically. You can do this with multiple tracks, picking an order you want to hear those songs, and then shuffling the rest. Or you can hit 'J' to search the list of the songs in the playlist, and select the song(s) you want to enqueue.
• Downloading Songs Off iPod Through The Media Player. Instead of assuming your user is doing something criminal and (flimsily) preventing them from easy access to the songs on their iPod, why not give them the freedom to move songs back and forth onto their hard drives. ml_ipod, a plug-in that lets you manage your iPod through Winamp's media library, not only allows you to transfer songs from your iPod, but lets you even "reverse-sync" them.
• Support for competing MP3 portables. I think I read somewhere that iTunes may support another mp3 player besides the iPod, but that really isn't enough. Once again, I think it'd be beneficial the popularity of the program if they supported other players. Have they released an SDK for their community to toy with? The Foobar and Nullsoft teams did this, and they got great results.
• Gapless playback on iPod. This is a big deal to audiophiles, and I'm really surprised by the iPod's lack of support on this. The Rio Karma does this. Why not iPod?

Though I'll admit that the join-tracks feature was much-welcomed, what else did iTunes users get? Instead of downloading songs with propietary DRM, now we can encode our songs with a new proprietary DRM--songs that won't play on anything else? I think I'll stick with FLAC. The ability to publish my important music playlists for the whole world to see? I think I'll stick with Audioscrobbler. A free song from another bland RIAA-sponsored band? Epitonic has always provided a good sampling of independent artists and their music for you to try out. A wishlist to download those Top 40 songs later? Well, why don't I just download the songs now off allofmp3 now with their ridiculously low prices, in whatever format I want, without DRM? Import unprotected WMA files? Winamp

Regardless of whether or not they censor albums, they will have, at best, the same meager ridiculous selection that every other service has.

Every time a new legal online-music appears, I take a look for the music that I like to listen to (Failure, Sneaker Pimps, etc; check my audioscrobbler if you're curious). Granted, they aren't exactly mainstream pop, but they aren't that uncommon. I still haven't found a service that reliably has some of those lesser-known artists (I just checked Wal-Mart's site, and they are no exception). If I'm going to do online music, then the selection had better be about as good as Amazon's.

I am writing this as a proposal for the geeks on this board who would like to take action against the **AA's of the world, yet don't want to be just another martyr. What I propose is a new kind of file sharing system that removes the need for the **AA's altogether. Although the system I envision will work nicely with music, it should translate fairly readily with books, movies, and other creative content as well. Done properly, it could be the 'killer app' Napster aspired to be and stand as incontrovertible proof that F/OSS systems pay off in ways other systems cannot. Please bear with me, because this will not be trite post.

1. If you can't join 'em, beat 'em.

We tried to be nice about it. We really did. We downloaded songs, books, and movies with a 'try before you buy' attitude. Buying what we liked, and declining what we didn't. But they didn't like that idea. Nooooo. God forbid we make an informed purchasing decision. They called us thieves, destroyed our centralized system, fought to strip us of our rights, crap flooded our networks, and took us to court. Well in the words of Bugs Bunny, 'Of course you realize this means war." So we've taken up the fight with new distributed systems, encryption, and plausible deniability. However, in our grand fight of "Us vs. Them" we've casually forgotten one of the 'Us'es. The artists, the creators, the people who produce what we download in the first place. Each and every one of our new distributed systems is just a more elaborate version of the one that came before. What we need is a system that gives the creators an incentive to share their works. We can continue to build better mice while they build better mousetraps, or we can start thinking of a ways to include the artists in our game plan. Kazaa, in a quest for legitimacy, is trying to do this. They are retrofitting a system onto a network that was designed with a single minded devotion to withstanding legal attacks. It wasn't meant to be what they want it to be and, as such, it is failing. As long as we exclude artists, they will continue to view us as the enemy. The entertainment industry is trying to pervert copyright through force of software, rather than law now. With DRM, the tables are turned. They're building mice and we're building mousetraps. Instead of focusing our efforts on breaking those systems, we should instead rectify those perversions by creating a system in the original spirit of copyright. Create a system that provides incentive to artists without stepping on the rights of the public. In doing so, we can create an open system in which the 'Them's can't compete, because the 'Them's aren't competitive anymore. We need the artists. What we don't need is the middleman.

2. Foundation for a new system.

Our new system has to perform three essential functions to supplant our much hated middlemen. Distribution, Marketing, Profit! By replacing the middleman's functionality, we can remove him from the process entirely. We are one third of the way there already. It's pretty obvious that we have distribution down to a science. Step two and three need more work.

3. Marketing

We need a way to 'spread the word' about content creators. I am convinced, as are a handful of others, that collaborative filtering is the way to go. A couple of notable mentions are iRate and AudioScrobbler. If you haven't used one of these systems, allow me to briefly describe iRate. When you launch the program, it downloads 20 'seed' songs. Songs that are popular across various groups of users. You rate these songs on a scale of 1 to 10 and it then tries to guess what songs you are likely to enjoy by comparing your ratings to the ratings of other users. It then sends you a few more songs, rinse, repeat. The longer you use it, the more accurate its guessing becomes. This is far superior

MusicBrainz::TRM does that. Also, there was the project Songprint (now defunct). The perl bindings for TRM (the part that listens to the song and makes a fingerprint) are currently broken. I can't manage to get them to work :/

The developers of musicbrains hang out on irc.freenode.net/#musicbrainz. They'll tell you to use libtunepimp, which can be found in their CVS repository on musicbrainz.org

There's an extremely cool website that is being developed by the audioscrobbler folks, Last.fm. It's a personalized radio station. You pick what songs you like, and it learns what you like. Very, very cool.

seems like. Then I guess it's too bad that while there's immense value in collaborative filtering, the emergent properties of the process are free. There's iRate, audioscrobbler, and many other projects popping up to do this kind of thing. It'll be the Next Big Thing once it's standard enough for the network effect to kick in.

--

What about AudioScrobbler? They use the music that you listen to and compare it to the music other people listen to. They then find people with similar music tastes to you, and then you can expand your tastes by looking at what they listen to.

(see my audioscrobbler>

What about AudioScrobbler? They use the music that you listen to and compare it to the music other people listen to. They then find people with similar music tastes to you, and then you can expand your tastes by looking at what they listen to.

(see my audioscrobbler>

Which is a major reason I'm looking forward to p2p netradio combined with "amazon-like" recommendation services such as AudioScrobbler, Gnod, and others. It's coming together.

--

Most songs that make it onto my playlists are because a close friend recommends it

That's one of the reasons that I use AudioScrobbler.
My brother lives about 500 miles away from me and we can see what each other is listening to. I'm pretty comfortable listening to just about anything in his playlist.
He's a freshman in college and I'm an old fart. This allows me to learn about a lot of new music.

"find out what other people who really like this song listen to" programs..
Methinks you'd like audioscrobbler, which is somewhat like firefly