Slashdot Mirror
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."
There, now we got that out of the way (and I do feel oddly better about life) I have to say that I'm still skeptical about these algorithms for music recommendation.
A friend of mine and I listen to a lot of the same music. He got me on the soul train in a way, so we talk a lot about Soul, R&B (The old fashioned kind), Funk, Rare Groove, Jazz and Gospel. Now he and I can dig the same song for wildly different reasons. We can sit and discuss the same tune, which we both like, and discover we look at the thing so differently it's as though we're from different planets.
Now I've tried all possible music sites and playlist generators, but at the end of the day I simply never really agree with the correlation they see between song one and song two. I really wonder if the /. audience believes something as complex as music appreciation can be captured in a program....
So, not really so much at all...?
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
When are people going to realize that unpopular music is unpopular for a reason. Sure the music execs try to push their own artists more than others, and they try to target the largest cross section of the population as possible, but why wouldn't they?
Trying to bring 'unpopular' must to the masses because that will suddenly make it popular is stupid. Music becomes popular because someone hears it and likes it, not just because they hear it.
Throwing Timmy's garage band onto every radio station in the world during prime time isn't going to change the fact that Timmy's garage band sucks and very few people want to hear it.
Yes, there are people who don't have the same tastes as the general public, that is a small portion of the public, nothing you do is going to change that. There will always be a bell curve. Stop with this crap of think just because you like some indie band that no one has heard of that everyone else will.
If the general public likes them they will become popular. If they play a local show and people like to hear them, they'll get requested and more people will hear them. Then more places will request them, and rinse, repeat, until they will become popular.
Unknown bands are unknown because they are interesting or 'good' to a small number of people, not because of some silly idea that they got shafted by a playlist generator. The playlist generator is simply following trends that it learns from people. It doesn't actually analyze the music to find the algorithm that makes it 'good music'. It says 'People that listen to this song also like this song, add it to the list', rinse, repeat, playlist generated. It doesn't say 'hey, no one listens to this song, lets throw it in and then everyone will like it!!!
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
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.
I tried Genius for awhile, but I recently disabled it for two reasons:
1) The "recommendations" were not very good nor did they maintain a "common theme", by which I mean, I chose a rather edgy electronica/punk song by Crystal Castles... three songs down we get something by The Nationals... which is very mellow rock. If I choose a song that is edgy, electric, and with a faster pace, I want ALL the songs in that 25 song playlist to be at least within a similar genre.
2) It takes up too much time when importing vast libraries to new machines. I recently centralized my 300+ GB music library on a Mac Mini Server, iTunes was unusable due to genius choking on the sheer volume of data it had to deal with.
In the end, it's really nothing more than a way for Apple to try to get you to buy more crap from the Apple store.
They lost my wallet years ago to Amazon MP3 store who had no DRM. I see no reason to go back to iTMS even now that their DRM is gone. Especially seeing what dicks Apple has been with their conduct around ACC, "fair play", and App Store lock-down.
I love music, but, alas...I'm getting older, and am stuck in classic rock. Funny...they weren't classic when I started listening to them..haha.
But seriously, even I'm getting a little weary of listening only to the Stones, Zeppelin, etc over and over and over again...
I really love any kind of good guitar driven, bluesy, riff-laden rock. Guitar blues...etc.
I have to guess even in this modern, splintered genre world, there is still some of this type of music being put out by new kids. I've found Wolfmother, and really like that...but, that was a recommendation I got from a friend, but, I don't have the time to find music out there.
When I grew up...it came through the radio. Music wasn't nearly as splintered and specialized as it is today. On my 'rock' stations, I heard Stones, Zeppelin, AC/DC, Steely Dan, Fleetwood Mac, Kansas, Beatles...hell even older than that you'd even hear an occasional John Denver or Olivia Newton John song....quite a mix without turning the dial.
Today on the radio, you have to tune stations all over to get each type of music it seems...and I just can't seem to find something with enough mix to keep my interest. And hit radio...same shit all the time, no variation.
People suggest the internet...well, most of my time is at work, and most places i work..won't allow you to stream music from the web, it is blocked. So, that's not my option.
I've recently discovered Pandora on the iPhone...I have started finding things like that I like from that.
I guess, more things like this and the tech mentioned in the article would really be a blessing for me if I could throw that one while at work, but, would have to be through the phone I guess since no streaming on work computer.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
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.
The wisdom of the crowds seem to be proving you wrong.
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...
Actually I've found last.fm's recommendation system works extremely well; so well in fact that I constantly have a tab open to it when I'm browsing music stores like eMusic (eventually I want to write a little app for this purpose using last.fm's API, but I digress). For those unaware, last.fm users submit what they're listening to through automated plugins (and the supported apps list is huge and very platform independent, I personally use both Amarok 1.4 and MPD); one of the things last.fm does with this music is identifies your "neighbors" (people with similar lastes, i.e. 8 of our top 10 artists are identical). I've found that one of the best ways to find new music is by browsing what my neighbors are listening to and checking out any of their top bands that I'm not familiar with. They also list related artists by correlating this information (e.g. the majority of users who have Band A as a favorite artist also like Band B). Another useful feature is being able to check what an artists most played songs are (great for when it's an artist you never heard of). With that said, I'm definitely interested in seeing what recommendations come from this UCSD team (and not just because I'm an alumnae) as I'm always interested in finding new artists, especially smaller and local ones.
Sadly, PS/2 was yet another victim of USB, which doesn't care what you plug into it, the electrical slut.
I've had great success with Gnoosic
It's exactly algorithms like the one used by Pandora that make me agree with the viewpoint that it's not possibly to calculate what "other music" I like based upon the "known music" that I like.
Anyone with a preference for Electro Pop will likely have been wondering when the hell Pandora would learn the difference between Miss Kittin and Scooter after mindlessly clicking "Dislike" on eurodance tracks when Pandora fails to see the difference between one type of electronic music with a repetitive beat and another.
The only really worthful algorithm we'll ever manage to produce is one that uses the collective intelligence of all its users.
Stop being arithmetic supergeeks wanting to put everything inside a box, and start figuring out how to get all these weird unpredictable people to input valuable data into your system.
Google figured this out more than a decade ago, so why are we still seeing stupid mathematical and "pattern-based" algorithms every year?
Setting aside the obvious joke, the "wisdom of crowds" has actually been proven to be useful in certain situations.
If you ask, say, a single person how many jelly beans are in a jar, he may or may not come close. If you ask several hundred people how many are in a given jar and then average their responses, the result tends to be surprisingly accurate.
The problem is that this is limited to situations requiring little to no topic-specific knowledge. Asking a large crowd of random people what the GDP of China is will be a waste of time. It's a technique that requires you to be asking the right questions.
For possibly the great majority of the population, music can be compared to fashion; does not really matter if the art is good per se, what matters is the trend and popularity, on a local scale (what my friends listen to) and global scale (media).
With the rock'n'roll revolution in the fifties, lots of teenagers liked that new music in part because it wasn't their parents' music. Same story can be said of disco, rap and grunge.
Problem with the long-tail approach is that people mostly judge music by non-musical criteria.
Last.fm's "neighbor" system works similarly, except it looks at what each person listens to. Keep in mind that it takes a fair bit of training to find neighbors who are actually close to your likes, but once you've listened to enough music, it's pretty good at finding things I like but have never heard of. I.E. if I like song A B C and D, and you like song A, B and C, you might like song D.
The neighbor system groups people with similar musical tastes, and allows each person to tune to his/her "Neighbor Radio", to listen to songs liked by your neighbors.
(Disclaimer: I have no vested interest in last.fm besides being a paid member. [My Profile])
I'm still skeptical about these algorithms for music recommendation.
You should be skeptical, but not dismissive. In its current state, this type of service is more like directed browsing than a true recommendation. But it still yields the an occasional gem, and with continued participation and increased competition it will get better. Skepticism makes it a useful tool, if you can live with having to wade through some misses along with the hits. Blind acceptance will, of course, be mercilessly exploited and the unwashed masses will still end up listening to the likes of [insert music you despise].
I just wish I could tweak the individual conditions to see where it'd get me... like having all criteria match except genre.
Even a line-item veto for the "why did you play this song" would be ideal. Thumbs up or thumbs down on every song seems to make the music selections worse, not better. Obviously which songs I like and which ones I don't doesn't neatly boil down to criteria that pandora can identify, so I think it's unavoidable that it will pick up on what it thinks I like but I don't.
For example, I like hip hop with clever lyrics, but hate rappers who can only talk about themselves. Most hip hop artists though rap about themselves at least a little, even the ones I enjoy. Simply because all rappers rap about themselves at least a little, any song I give a thumbs up, it's always going to think I like that and will start playing songs that are -only- about the rapper. If I make a station around Aesop Rock, who rap about things besides how well they rap, the selections are good. If I hit "I like" for too many songs though, the selections get worse, looking in "why did you play this song" there is always a line about "boastful lyrics." Being able to select "no, not that one" would be a plus, as the other criteria get better.
(Please, try to resist the temptation to post on how you don't like hip hop. I know, I know, rap music is missing a c, that's very clever.)
I've found a lot of songs/bands I had never heard of thanks to Pandora. I started a station based on "Panic Attack" by Dream Theater, and it's interesting to look at "why was this song selected" for new songs. The current song I'm listening to says "we're playing this track because it features a subtle use of paired vocal harmony, varying tempo and time signatures, chromatic harmonic structure and demanding instrumental part writing." I could have said that I like varying tempo and time signatures, and demanding instrumental parts, but it's neat that it can pick up on things like chromatic harmonic structure and paired vocal harmony.
Is to get 10 recommendations I have to listen to 10 songs in a row due to their skip limitations.
They can keep their skip limitation, that's fine, I get the licensing problem they have.
But why can't I get a simple list of the next N (10, 20...100?) songs they'd recommend based on my current "station"? It might even improve their recommendation engine for me because I could thumbs up/down (and I suppose, "I'm tired of this one", too) the songs and cut through the cruft faster. Sort of like Netflix "Rate Movies" engine which allows for more inputs to the rating system.
I also am annoyed that you can add a *song*, which is highly specific, or an artist which is somehwhat specific, but not highly so given some artists creative changes over time, but you cannot add by *album*.
For example, IMNSHO REM's Chronic Town, Murmur & Reckoning are brilliant and most everything else after is less (often much less) so. Adding those *albums* defines a general yet atomic set of musical criteria; adding the entire band and all its albums biases it much more towards the later records, even by sheer weight of number of songs.
This is true for dozens of bands whose sound changed substantially over time or whose last N albums were horseshit or whatever.
All in all, I *want* to like it but the "service" doesn't mesh with how I listen to music from a practicality sense (streaming via iPhone blows on my car stereo and is a battery hog elsewhere) and 10 recommendations aren't worth 30 minutes of sitting down.
I don't know how last.fm works but I downloaded the android application on my phone and so far it is treating me well. It is much faster than pandora and allows me to listen either by entering an artist, tag, or user. So in tags if I type in Jpop I get a bunch of japanese pop songs. I can find stuff from other countries as well which is cool.
It almost feels like iPods are overrated now. It would be cool if I just subscribed to a service and used my phone to stream in music based on my preferences or playlist. Then all music available on the internet (world) would be accessible as long as I had a 3G signal.
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.
Their experiments show that automatic recommendations work at least as well as Genius for recommending undiscovered music.
At least as well as never recommending? That is astounding.
10 minutes with someone who works in an independent record store will help you find better music than any algorithm (or any Top 40/Adult Contemporary radio station for that matter). That is, if you can find someone friendly in one of these stores...
Paraphrased from actual conversation in an indie record store:
Record store owner: "Why do people keep coming back here?"
Employee: "Well, it's not friendliness..."
Owner: "WHAT?! I'm the most f***ing friendly guy there is!
Freedom is drinking a beer in the park when you're supposed to be at work.
HKs will listen to METAL.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
I remember reading somewhere in the pandora algorithm that you should only click "Thumbs Up" for songs you really like, not every song you like. If you like a song, but there are aspects of it you don't like then don't select anything, just let it play.
I know this isn't as nice as being able to select individual features of a song, but what are you going to do?
Sewage Treatment Facilities - "Our duty is clear."
I've played with Pandora radio a bit before, but it doesn't tend to work for my taste in music. I like songs with funny lyrics... Monty Python, King Missile, Nellie McKay... the algorithms that focus strictly on musical styles generate pretty hilarious results, but not what I'm looking for :P
I've been pretty happy with some of the dj internet radio stations, though, like somafm.com and some of the ones on di.fm . Before I found some of those stations, I didn't really think there was much of any music that I liked. Certainly not on broadcast or satellite radio.
The difference between a marketing department and a PR department is the quality of the work they do. A PR firm gets more press for free than a marketing firm gets for pay. It's important to know the difference, this isn't marketing, it's public relations.
If they ask you the question, "What color is this song?", and you answer "Green", but most of the other players answer "Black"..then they ask you that same question again...what are you going to answer THIS time? If they had more than 20 questions to cycle through, they might get useful data. As it is, I think it is just a cleverly designed advertisement for Frank Zappa.
Please read the GP. He's talking about the difference between Miss Kittin and Scooter. Scooter! There's a difference between "broadening your taste" and licking out a septic tank.
Well, when possible the internet is the best place; you can get "radio" from just about every radio station in the world. Go to KSHE for the oldest FM stereo rock station in the world, who played "classic rock" before it was classic and still do, along with some of today's dreck. On Sunday night they play seven albums in their entirety, back to back.
College stations are great, too. The one here in Springfiled, WQNA, is the only station I've ever heard where you can hear Tennessee Ernie Ford followed by the Dead Kennedies, followed by Johnny Cash (The DKs are a 70s punk band). Sunday mornings is old 30s and 40s jazz, noon is a blues show, Tuesday nights there's a "hardcore" show followed by a country oldies show. Wednesday nights they have belly dancing music, etc.
Free Martian Whores!