My favourite CD shop when I was a kid was small and selectively stocked. Small handwritten comments adorned every cover, and the owner had a forensic ability to make music recommendations that bordered on precognition.
Unfortunately, his precognition extended only to song choices and his story ended on a familiar note – run out of business by a chain store. Now there is the new generation of online recommendation networks chasing the Holy Grail of consumer preferences analysis. Namely – can you help people figure out what they like?
Using technology to profile consumer preferences is nothing new. Amazon pioneered it with books, Netflix with DVDs and TiVo with TV programs. The approaches vary, but are generally based on a statistical method known as collaborative filtering. By comparing your transaction history with customers who have similar purchasing habits, a recommendation system can then be used to predict other products you might like. Sometimes that works well – people who enjoyed watching action extravaganzas, such as Terminator 3, will probably enjoy Mission Impossible.
But there are certainly limitations to that approach – identity confusion being a central one (as infamously reported in the Wall Street Journal article “My TiVo Thinks I’m Gay”). Buying books for your wife on your Amazon account or letting someone else use the remote on your TiVo can suddenly make a supposedly clever recommendation service seem more artificial than intelligent.
Apparently – the iPod has changed everything. Music suggestion services are running hot again. Pandora, Last.FM and Music Strands have all been recently funded and offer varying degrees of music advice. Pandora, in particular, has taken the unique tactic of employing music analysts to study the underlying structure of recordings to classify them based on set criteria, such as speed, rhythm and even rapping style.
While it may be fun daydreaming of magic equations that predict consumer tastes, a more fruitful path might lie in the less scientific, grassroots community networks organised around music interests. Both Last.FM and Music Strands have online friendship and group forum functions built into their service – but there is no better current example of social networking and music at work than MySpace.
First and foremost, MySpace is about finding, chatting and co-creating content with friends. However, somewhere along the line music also became a key part of the service. So, although MySpace is not designed to actively recommend new music, the same result is achieved by connecting with other users and sharing the experience of music and bands with them.
The shared experience of entertainment media is an area that has been much overlooked until recently. If you look at the companies that Yahoo has been buying, such as Flickr (community photo sharing) and del.icio.us (community content tagging), a powerful subtext is that people not only want to create their own content, but they also want to share it with each other. One of the prevailing lunacies from some Web 2.0 crack addicts is that community generated content will overwhelm anything created by a publisher, movie studio or record label. But look closely at the content of many popular blogs today and you will see how much of the discussion centers on popular movies, recording artists or books. In other words, we are witnessing the shared experience of media rather than its demise.
That said, where future recommendation systems will make themselves most useful is in the area of emerging rather than established artists or high budget entertainment products.
Recommendation is actually a subtle problem of search rather than one of taste comparison. The problem is complex because it cannot be solved by spiders indexing content or a set of clever probability algorithms. In an emergent social network based on music, the most effective fi lters are actually other people.
This is not a theoretical argument. You can see this trend in action. The reason that over half a million bands are using MySpace to market themselves today is that it is a highly effective platform for recruiting fans, distributing music and encouraging an everwidening circle of conversations about your brand. It is a total reversal of the usual way of thinking about consumer purchasing behaviour. Don’t search for the music. It will find you.
Mike Walsh is a commercial strategist in the media and entertainment sector.
You can read his daily blog at www.fourth-estate.com
