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Going Head To Head With Genius On Playlists
brownerthanu writes "Engineers at the University of California, San Diego are developing a system to include an ignored sector of music, dubbed the 'long tail,' in music recommendations. It's well known that radio suffers from a popularity bias, where the most popular songs receive an inordinate amount of exposure. In Apple's music recommender system, iTunes' Genius, this bias is magnified. An underground artist will never be recommended in a playlist due to insufficient data. It's an artifact of the popular collaborative filtering recommender algorithm, which Genius is based on. In order to establish a more holistic model of the music world, Luke Barrington and researchers at the Computer Audition Laboratory have created a machine learning system which classifies songs in an automated, Pandora-like, fashion. Instead of using humans to explicitly categorize individual songs, they capture the wisdom of the crowds via a Facebook game, Herd It, and use the data to train statistical models. The machine can then 'listen to,' describe and recommend any song, popular or not. As more people play the game, the machines get smarter. Their experiments show that automatic recommendations work at least as well as Genius for recommending undiscovered music."
I know you say you've tried all possible music sites... but on Pandora if you create a new station from an artist or song, they'll give you the criteria they use to populate the playlist.
Set up stations based on enough songs, and it's pretty easy to understand at least part of how their algorithm works. A big problem, of course, is that some of the criteria are somewhat subjective, which is why you may disagree with them. I find this especially true when creating stations based on artists, not songs.
I just wish I could tweak the individual conditions to see where it'd get me... like having all criteria match except genre.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
Very possibly, but even if it's totally non-commercial there's still valid reasons for wanting to track where your traffic is coming from. It's probably marketing of some kind, but maybe not sold and paid for.
More precisely, popular causes good. Norms cause people to want to act the same way. Some people will listen to music because of its artistic appeal and others will listen to a specific type of music to distinguish themselves from the norm in some way. But the crowd will want to listen to what the crowd listens to *because* that's what the crowd is listening to. Nobody wants to take from the long tail exactly because there's nobody paying attention to the long tail.
Capitalism: Hello there Academic. How are you?
Academic: Hi... what they heck are you? You look so strange to me...
Capitalism: I'm Capitalism. Oh, I'm really not all that strange, but I might be a little complicated to understand.
Academic: Complicated!?! I am the master of complicated, I am an Academic for crying out loud.
Capitalism: Ok then. Let me try to explain myself. I am a system that provides stuff via supply and demand.
Academic: Nonsense! I dont hear music that deserves to be heard on the radio or on popular websites!
Capitalism: Deciding who deserves what really isnt my thing... see... its about supply and demand...
Academic: But who decides whats in demand!?! Certainly it cannot be the uneducated "masses", they... just aren't qualified!
Capitalism: No no... its about what many individuals, smart or otherwise, want based on need or dozens of different other factors.
Academic: Preposterous! How could they possibly know what they want or need if they havent been exposed to it?!? Foolish Capitalism!
Capitalism: Well, there are a lot of musicians out there and only so many different ways to get them heard, and, well, there are people out there who spend their lives learning what people like and dislike, and even they arent always right... so the best at determining who does best succeeds...
Academic: Rubbish! What we really need, is for the qualified, with a broad base of tastes to make an application for people to give them a view of all the music that is out there!
Capitalism: I guess you can try, no one can stop you, but you might not succeed.
Academic: Your so short sighted. I don't need to worry about succeeding, I receive public money to pursue my higher realm of thinking.
Capitalism: Right on... so I guess you will compete and regardless if your product sucks, you dont have to worry about it because your really just spending someone elses money.
Academic: Its progress my dear boy. Progress.
20th century Marxism is not progress...
Are you generally this obtuse?
The idea is not to popularize shitty bands. Given perfect AI, this program is supposed to do the following:
1) Listen to all popular music (for various classes of popular).
2) Figure out why that music is popular (for its class).
3) Listen to any *new* track and figure out if it is like those popular tracks (and any popular class).
Now of course we don't have that kind of AI and hence all this research.
The idea is to promote good bands that would have been popular except for the fact that they are not already popular and hence might go unnoticed.
But that's not the point of the algorithm. The point is to generate a playlist of songs that share some characteristics with criteria you have specified via examples (seeds for a station, and up/down votes on songs in the playlist). It's not about your personal likes and dislikes, it;s about songs that are similar.
My personal experience: Don't use downvotes until the station is somewhat mature. Use upvotes only, so the algorithm can find the common ground basis for the station. Then, after 10-20 hours of playtime, use downvotes to start eliminating unwanted characteristics.
One last point: Pandora is good for general tastes. As your wants get very specific within a genre, as you point out, it starts to fail. My general advice for you is to not try to use Pandora to create a pseudo-random playlist of only songs you know you like. After tailoring your station, buy the songs you like. Then you can create a playlist in your preferred audio-file management software, and listen to only the songs you like. Revisit Pandora or elsewhere to expand your collection as needed. I think this is the only way you'll be really satisified.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
Or stop being so picky about your music, broaden your tastes and learn to enjoy things that don't fit into your specific little boxes...