Re:Steve Miller: The Whole Music Industry Is Fuckin' Gangste...
by CuriouslyC on Tuesday April 12, 2016 @01:35PM
(#11481670)
The problem with last.fm (and almost all similar music services) is that a lot of the similarity they encapsulate is chronological and social similarity, rather than musical similarity. For example, a search for Nirvana pulls up Hole (social similarity, the Courtney Love connection) and Pearl Jam (social & chronological similarity) quite high on the list, even though neither really sounds that much like Nirvana. On the other hand, The Pixies, which are musically much closer to Nirvana aren't even on the list.
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Re:Steve Miller: The Whole Music Industry Is Fuckin' Gangste...
by btilly on Tuesday April 12, 2016 @04:23PM
(#11483248)
How do you measure similarity to capture what you want?
The obvious approach is that you look for "people who like this, like that". This is easy to measure and understand. And when you're faced with a person who liked this, it is usually the right answer.
The problem is that you don't know WHY people who like this, like that. Often it is simply, "Heard both at an impressionable age." What you want it to be is, "On the musical criteria that I can recognize, this music is similar." But that's a complex piece of logic, and it is not clear how to do so.
Which makes the tools really good for rediscovering all of the stuff from your childhood, and really bad for discovering new music that is similar to stuff you like.
Re:Steve Miller: The Whole Music Industry Is Fuckin' Gangste...
by Grishnakh on Tuesday April 12, 2016 @05:59PM
(#11483948)
You do it by objectively analyzing the music from a technical standpoint. That's how last.fm started; it was someone's research project to look for "musical DNA" and then use that "signature" to find similar music. It actually worked well.