Net, Blogs and Rock'n'Roll

Sun Labs 'Search inside the music' interview

Here is my third interview. I spoke to Paul Lamere (pictured left) just an hour or two after my chat to Zac Johnson. Some of their points overlap with each other: for example, Paul's Green Day/Weezer/Radiohead argument about collaborative filtering is pretty similar to Zac's, which he illustrated with the Beatles/Bob Marley/James Brown. However, there are also minor differences and nuances of emphasis, reflecting, perhaps, the perspectives of their employers.

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Paul Lamere works for Sun Labs in Boston, where he's the Principal Investigator for a project called Search Inside the Music. Unusually among industrial research labs, Sun's are funded from the corporate treasury, rather than product groups, which gives them greater scope for blue sky thinking, while still focusing on the needs of Sun's customers, who include a variety of high-profile music service providers.

Paul is interested in the whole music discovery process. Citing the long tail effect, he sees the challenge as providing the link between a million songs in the backroom and the mobile device in your hand. The ideal would be to have an option on that device that just says "play me music I like".

AMG Tapestry interview

Here's the second in my series of interviews for the book, with many thanks to Zac Johnson for his time and insights. As these interviews are not the primary source of research for the book, I'm not aiming to be comprehensive, but I'm very open to talking to anyone who'd like volunteer their views and describe work relevant to the book's themes, especially if these are different to the ones I've documented. I guess what I'm saying is that if you read this and think, "Hey, I've got something to say about that, so David should speak to me", please don't wait to see if I contact you, because I may not — please just get in touch.

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Zac Johnson has been working at All Media Guide (AMG) for six years. His focus is mostly on AMG's music site, AllMusic.com, though AMG also publishes the All Movie Guide and the All Game Guide, and Zac also has a view across the three sites. Recently his focus has been on what he calls "intelligent playlisting", through the Tapestry service (which I covered in part on my other blog).

Zac sees two main applications for intelligent playlisting. The first is music discovery: where you provide examples of the music you like and ask, "play me more stuff like this, but which I haven't heard before". The second is soundtracking, where you say, "I want to go driving/fishing/to the gym — give me a bunch of music that fits this activity (and which I may already know)".

The Blogs in the title

The title of the book is Net, Blogs and Rock'n'Roll, but the amount of coverage of blogs per se will be relatively small. I use 'blogs' to stand for the more general growth of user-generated content (including wikis, forums, photo-sharing etc) and its cultural implications.

These implications in turn affect the circulation of word-of-mouth recommendations, the development of 'buzz', and thus some of the ways in which people discover new music, films or other entertainment.

User-generated content is also an ugly term, but I think it's useful and important to be as clear as possible about what I mean by the culture of blogging/user-generated content. Here are my suggestions for some defining characteristics. So for 'blogs', please read:

Classic.tv Case Study

I'm doing a handful of interviews relating to different ways of discovering music, and how they fit into the overall new media ecology. I'm not sure yet how, or even if, these will be reflected in the book. But in the meantime, I will make a few notes available on this blog, starting with an interesting case study of an in-development initiative to provide a specialist on-demand classical music TV channel. Here are my notes, with many thanks to Frances Maxwell for the time and input she gave me.

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Will interviews with composers and performers, and other DVD-extra-style content, encourage people to find out more about areas of classical music that they don't know? Can on-demand videos of concert performance draw in an audience that might be wary of attending concerts themselves, safe in the knowledge that, with the video, they can always 'leave' if they don't like it? Frances Maxwell, Channel Producer at Classic.tv, which is currently in its development phase, is staking her time and energy on the answer to these questions being Yes.

Music and movies: cross-content recommendations

The latest prototype from the prolific MusicStrands labs is a tool for recommending music tracks and artists, based on a movie title, as described here. So you type in your favourite films, and MusicStrands gives you a list of tracks and a list of artists that it thinks you might like. And if there are any photos on Flickr that are linked to the film, it shows you them as a bonus.

The first things I try to do with any prototype are figure out how it works and test its limits to breaking point.

Word of mouth marketing and playlisting

Last year I wrote an article under the title "Big Mouth Strikes Again: Sinking your teeth into word of mouth marketing and playlisting", which was published as the cover feature in the August issue of Five Eight music business magazine. Here's the introduction (written by Five Eight editor, Eamonn Forde):

Word of mouth is a term passed around the marketing playground everyday. But in a culture where the marketplace is increasingly connected, it is time to ask how these powerful and very personal phenomena can be understood and exploited. Word of mouth springs from communities — increasingly more powerful because of online and mobile — where trust is key. How can the music industry effectively work in and, crucially, with these communities and build a relationship of trust and effective recommendation systems, particularly through playlisting?

A few issues have moved on since last year, and my take on word-of-mouth in the book will be slightly different. But here's the full article, with hyperlinks and links to related articles.