MusicStrands helps people to
discover new music. Why is this important to people? What are recommendation and discovery technologies?
In the old days, a group of experts defined tastes and made recommendations.
Experts (industry, radio, music stores, etc) were in charge of programming the music we would listen to,
they were our source of music discovery. However, the world is
changing, now we have tools to discover the music we may like, there are more recordings to
choose from (production costs of music have dropped dramatically), and it is easier for us to
access this music via Internet.
Recommendation and discovery technologies developed by MusicStrands empower people to discover the music they may like, regardless of the popularity or commercial interest of the music.
We also discover music through friends.
Yes! Friends always have been our best source
for music discovery, the only way to escape from the tyranny of popular tunes. That is why we at
MusicStrands want to make it extremely easy to share our tastes with others, and to help people
discover music through the online community. Download MyStrands, and you will be able to know
what your friends are listening to, in real-time!
The Internet makes sharing tastes easier.
Thanks to the Internet, music discovery is now a conversation among people, not merely an imposition of experts on fans, or of machines on users. By facilitating for people the discovery of music through others, you begin to create the serendipity of discovering truly new stuff, you create entry points for people to dig into the long tail. There is a lot of music out there and people want to discover it. Moreover, taste in music is not static but dynamic; sharing tastes helps you adapt to your current needs.
The amazingly great thing about the Internet is that the pyramid has been turned upside down; you now have people expressing what they’re interested in. The content – music - is no longer pushed from the experts (labels) to the people, but is instead pulled (discovered) by the people.
What impact will taste-sharing have in the music industry?
According to Gartner research by Mike McGuire and Derek Slater,
“consumer taste sharing is driving the online music business and
democratizing culture”. As described by Professor William Fisher III
in his book Promises to Keep, “over the course of the 20th century,
the power to make cultural meanings in most Western countries has
become ever more concentrated”. And tools such as MusicStrands and
others of the Web2.0 era, allow people to play a greater role in
shaping culture, which, in turn, shapes themselves.
Moreover, Gartner notes that “by 2010, 25% of online music store
transactions will be driven directly from consumer-to-consumer
taste-sharing applications, such as playlist publishing” and other solutions.
Following Chris Anderson’s article in Wired, “The long tail”, do you envision a
future with fewer big hits?
I expect that we will see more fragmentation of musical taste. So,
I expect that the slope of the curve will be more flat. We have
already seen this fragmentation in news groups where people - irrespective
of their location, age, origin - find each other based on common interests.
And they often discover other people in the world who have similar interests;
people who, if they had only watched broadcast television, would have never
discovered their common interests. Think about ethnic and social minorities as an
example, and the same will happen in music, is happening in music already. Small groups
who find each other and then empower each other, reinforce each other in their taste and ideas.
My prediction is that it will be less of a hit-driven business,
and we will see more of the Indies (independent artists) appear. This is one of
the missions of MusicStrands: to help independent artists surface in those communities
where they are appreciated.
We live today in the era of
participation, an era in which people want to share and express themselves. What are the characteristics of this new era, of Web2.0?
In the United States, in the last couple of years, a lot of thought leadership
has been captured by what is called “architectures of participation”, a term
Tim O’Reilly coined a couple of years ago. Web2.0 is the empowerment of people,
of readers, of listeners… to participate and to contribute. The incentives
for people are a key element of Web2.0, when people participate they have
an instant benefit for themselves. And their participation and
contribution provides a larger benefit to the community as a whole.
Let me give you an example. MusicStrands allows you to tag your music, to tag
a song. The immediate benefit for yourself is that you will be able to organise
songs by tags, for instance, songs you tag with happy are your songs that make you feel happy.
By sharing these tags with the rest of the MusicStrands community,
you help others discover songs that you label happy, and of course you are enabled
to discover songs that others
labelled as happy.
In doing this, people’s foremost desire is to manage their own content.
Then they might want to be exhibitionistic and show it to others; they may
quickly discover that, by being voyeuristic, they also can enjoy the attention of
millions of persons. So there is an immediate payback for the individual. But you
are also creating value for others, for the community, which is closely related to
my talk at the IE Alumni Conference, about people creating value.
Any other site using tags?
Flicker uses tags to describe pictures and helps people to
discover them based on the community tags. Delicious.com allows you to tag websites,
technorati.com for blogs.
What new trends do you
foresee in the entertainment sector?
We see the disaggregation of the CD. People now don’t need to buy a whole CD
(a package of songs previously bundled by “experts”), now you can buy individual
songs and create the playlists according to your specific tastes.
This leads us to another trend: the institutionally-pushed sales are going to
be replaced by the listener-pulled discoveries (people decide what specific
songs they like and want to buy). We see this trend in the media industry as
well; now people receive via RSS feeds only areas of content they have
previously decided are likely to interest them.
Another trend in the entertainment sector is, of course, the fact that one box
does all. We see this in home entertainment: the boundary between a computer
and the home entertainment system is disappearing. We also see that our mobile phones
(mobile devices or multimedia mobile computers) allow us to access digital content and
do many other things, for example, to enjoy music in new ways: this means that
potentially we may not need another device. Convergence has arrived with technology,
media, and telecommunications. Of course, telcos and carriers will be able to profit
from that by selling more airtime, more connect time, more bandwidth.
What role will mobile devices play in a connected world?
Mobile devices are in a great position to be the centre of a connected world,
thanks to ubiquity and always-on characteristics. In fact, mobiles will capture
a significant share from other devices, including the PCs, TVs, MP3 players... And mobile
operators need to understand consumer infotainment and media needs to succeed. Look
at the advertising potential in the mobile market, it’s untapped!
As entertainment content goes digital, mobile devices become an important
entry point to enjoy all this content. In our case, our technologies will offer the user
a converged experience across different platforms, providing people with simple ways to
discover new music, to organise personal libraries, and to synchronize PC music libraries with phones.
Machine learning models that integrate our past behaviour and information about the
current situation may be able to deliver, on the mobile device, incredibly powerful
personalized and situationalized content for us. It will give us the music we may like in a specific context.
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