There have been a couple of interesting postings in the last week on the Yahoo! Music Blog — almost as interesting for their candid, open style as for their content. First, Ian C Rogers outlines the new features of the Yahoo! Music Engine. Ian’s blog post seems to take the place of a corporate press […]
Future of Music
Online radio revisited and updated
It’s almost two years since I argued here that online radio is the model for listening to music in the future. I know there aren’t many who mark this anniversary as a national holiday, but to me it felt like a point where several things clicked into place in my mind. There’s a fascinating article […]
Active and passive music listening
There’s a passage near the beginning of David Toop’s Haunted Weather (reviewed here) where he writes, “trying to listen to everything has almost destroyed my desire to listen to anything”. In a column in January’s issue of Word magazine, Paul Du Noyer wrote about the ubiquity of music and entertainment being almost totalitarian, and referred […]
Peer-to-peer recommendations coming to mobile
Proving that convergence is rapidly becoming a fait accompli, news of personalised radio on mobiles is supplemented by peer-to-peer recommendations on mobile devices, currently in prototype development through the Push!Music project in Gothenburg. The site encourages you to Imagine that you have a mobile device that can store and play back music files, for example […]
Personalised radio moves to mobile
An unavoidable usability limitation of mobile phones is that you can’t create a small, multi-purpose user interface that is well-suited to all the tasks asked of it: text entry, information browsing, taking photographs, playing games and even making calls. That’s why a phone will never have the ease of use for music applications that the […]
Playlist portability: comparative review
One thing leads to another and, when we saw Barb Jungr play just before Christmas, I got a copy of her Every Grain of Sand album of Bob Dylan covers, which triggered another bout of my recurrent mania for these cover versions. I went through all my old covers albums again, ripped my favourite versions […]
Research on playlists and sharing as means of recommending music
The transition to online music distribution is occurring at the same time that consumers have an exploding number of sources of information about music, from established media sources to Internet-connected friends and strangers. As a result, getting the word out about new material, new bands or back catalogs is made more difficult for music marketers […]
MusicStrands: playlist sharing and music discovery
Last week MusicStrands launched a major upgrade that extends its scope by adding new ways to tag, discuss, and discover music — see the overview of the new features. This is moving in the direction of the MySpace music community — technically I think it’s a step ahead of MySpace, but clearly lacks the latter’s […]
Will Internet music radio have no competition?
“When given a choice between listening to music over the Internet or traditional radio stations, 54% prefer the Internet while 30% prefer radio,” according to this research from Bridge Ratings. Is this a simple trade-off between the two, or, if it is that simple in the US, might it be different elsewhere? I was reading […]
Does music have a genome?
Alongside the Last.FM model of personalised online radio (which I covered at some length and have cited in several other posts), Pandora provides an alternative based on different technology and classifications: We take your input (artists, songs) and feedback (“I like this”, “I don’t like this”) and use the Music Genome Project™ to create stations […]