Music recommendation services and personalised radio stations like Last.FM depend on tracking the behaviour and preferences of their users, and building personal profiles on the basis of this. So what happens if the data you feed into these services isn’t a human’s preferences, but something else, like the programming of a traditional radio station or […]
Future of Music
Celestial jukebox moves a little closer?
It’s supported by ads, you can only play tracks five times, the tracks are streamed (not downloaded) and of modest quality, and (most significantly for me) it only works in the US, but apart from that, the free Napster service — launched today — is the closest thing yet to the vision of a ‘celestial […]
Satellite and internet radio recording: ‘could’ versus ‘should’
After nearly three years of blogging, I’m beginning to appreciate one of the ways it keeps you honest: your past projections and predictions are still there to haunt you when (to mix metaphors) the chickens come home to roost. I don’t think what I wrote about ‘martini media’ one or two years ago was wrong […]
Neil Young: Living With War
[Click the image to hear Neil Young’s new album in full.] Even if I didn’t like all the results when Neil Young first donned a vocoder and got a synthesiser in 01982, when he put out a rockabilly album months later, followed by a country album, and so on, I liked the fact that he […]
Virtual listening sessions with your buddies
For years it’s been common for people posting to music-related email lists and forums to sign-off with a note saying “now playing” (abbreviated to “np”) followed by the title of the album they had on while composing the message. It’s a way of adding a personal touch, disclosing a bit more of your musical identity, […]
Copyright infringement in shared playlists: don’t blame the carrier?
When I created a playlist on Webjay last year, I noted the varying legal statuses of the recordings I included — from public domain to creative commons to promotional ‘giveaway’ — including one I deleted when I knew it was not authorised and had read Webjay’s legal guidance. This Reuters article seems aimed at stirring […]
Music recommendation data spread about
Having written last month about Pandora apparently opening up, and having drawn comparisons with Last.fm, two music services have licensed some of the Last.fm data to add recommendations to their sites. Download store and magazine site TuneTribe.com is perhaps the less interesting example. Their home page now has a search facility “powered by Last.fm”. Provided […]
Something fishy about MusicStrands recommendations
When I reviewed MusicStrands at the end of last year, I noted something odd about the recommendations that the system gave me. I started entering a playlist that I’d already entered on several other similar services (including Art of the Mix, Mixmatcher, FIQL and GoFish). When I was half-way through entering the playlist on MusicStrands, […]
Is Pandora opening up?
There’s an interesting press release about Pandora and Friendster hooking up together to bring a social dimension to Pandora’s ‘personal radio stations’. (The press release currently appears on Friendster’s site, but not on Pandora’s — not sure if there’s any significance in that.) Bringing Friendster and Pandora together takes the experience to another level: Friendster […]
Is it the music or the player that’s free?
Eleven months ago, when writing about Magnatune’s TunePlug USB Drive that comes pre-loaded with music, I asked the question, “is it possible that we’ll start to see promotional products that bundle player and music at prices little more than you would normally pay for the music alone?” Now that Dixons is offering a 512MB MP3 […]