Net, Blogs and Rock'n'Roll

Mufin.com: content-based recommendations

I get a fair number of people approaching me to tell me that their music recommender system is the best because of [insert special secret sauce here]. Usually this doesn't go much further: after all, the sauce is secret and can't be shared; so I say I'll be interested to keep in touch with their progress, and I bite my lip to resist repeating my sceptical view that any recommender system only has to be good enough to keep people coming back for more recommendations.

In the case of Berlin-based mufin.com, launching in private beta today, the story is slightly different, as they sent me all their publicity release information, and Petar Djekic was willing to talk to me on the record as it were. They even gave me an invite code to give away — that's my disclosure out of the way!

Mufin.com grew out of the Fraunhofer Institute, also the birthplace of the MP3 format, and the technically interesting part of what they're doing builds on that strong research base in audio and acoustics. What mufin.com does is known as content-based filtering rather than collaborative user-based filtering. In other words, rather than saying "people who like this artist/song also like this artist/song", it says "this song is similar in important ways to this song, so if you like one, you may like the other". Or in other words, think more like Pandora than Last.fm.

Fan culture and public service: media versus broadcasting

All through last week the smart people at BBC Radio Labs published a series of research summaries under the heading "fan cultures in radio".

The research projects covered different forms of fan participation around radio, from message boards, listeners to an avuncular breakfast DJ, and a long-running soap opera. The one I was waiting for — and which will possibly be of most interest to readers of this blog — was the relationship between 'specialist' music programmes and fans, by Andrew Dubber and Tim Wall.

The published summary doesn't give us much reporting of the actual behaviour of specialist music fans (any chance of a fuller account being made available, I wonder?), but focuses on the range of orientations of the BBC to meeting the needs of these fans:

Drawing on our examination of the fan activities of specialist music enthusiasts, and the way BBC staff who serve their interests conceive their professional practices, we think such a shift would allow discussion of the difference between a 'one-to-many', centre-to-receptive-audience model and the 'many-to-many' forms of communication that are more typical online. More to the point, the term 'broadcasting' pretty much just means radio and television, when in fact recorded popular music is a media form in itself.

Plugging Claire Tchaikowski's new album

Please excuse a brief promotional post on behalf of a friend. I first met Claire Tchaikowski  almost exactly a year ago after she agreed to  give a response to my talk at the RSA.  I gave her a copy of my book; she gave me a copy of her still unmastered first album. Claire was  originally signed to Sony-BMG, and has had 'interest' from two other major labels. But for now she's going it alone, and her album is released today on iTunes (256 kbps, no DRM) via Artists Without a Label. You can also hear one of the tracks in full on Last.fm. I'm not under any illusions that this blog is on the radar of music tastemakers, but am just chipping in my personal recommendation to anyone who might lend an ear. Quote me on this: you'll like Claire more than Dido. And if you're in London, she's supporting Luka Bloom in three weeks' time.   

The professionalisation of amateur fan production

Fans are themselves major producers of resources that aid discovery — for both committed and casual or new fans. This a theme that I've returned to a few times on this blog (example). In the published version of my book I wrote about the tensions that might arise if this 'amateur' fan production continues to get more 'professional':

[S]ome fan economy endeavours are approaching the status of cottage industries, and have a high profile in their niche areas. They may play a significant role in charting parts of the Long Tail that mainstream media fail to reach. Commercial interests may want to license the materials that fans have curated and created. If this happens, or if what fans have built directly helps to lift artists and creators… out of the Long Tail to reach a larger audience, they may be justified in expecting a non-trivial share of the earnings that result.

This is the point where the fan economy bleeds into the traditional media economy. There may be opportunities for some… fans to go semi-professional if they show that they can build a credible audience or network of other fans, sufficient to attract sponsorship or merchandising deals. This could become a popular route to starting or building a career in the wider media sector, but it will also cause friction and disagreements where it is perceived to threaten the non-commercial ethos of hard-line blog culture.

The first draft of the book had an extended scenario to illustrate both the creep of professionalism and the tensions it brings. I can't write narrative or dialogue well enough to pass muster for publication in a book, so that's why this ended up on the cutting room floor, along with my other fictional scenarios. But in the hope that it might still be of interest to some, here it is.

Streaming versus Downloading: What are they good for?

I have a theory that the way we get to know music is a bit like the way we get to know potential mates. After the initial attraction, there's a flirting, getting-to-know-you stage; and then there's a going steady stage. One difference is that, with music, polygamy is fine, and it's OK to be going steady and promiscuous at the same time!

I'm interested in how these stages relate to discover-versus-ownership and to streaming-versus-downloading. It's too simplistic to say streaming = discovery = flirting (= the new radio?) while downloading = ownership = commitment (= the new record collection?), but nevertheless it seems plausible that there might be some connection between these behaviours.

According to one British ISP, the last year has seen streaming traffic almost triple, while volumes of peer-to-peer (P2P) downloads have actually fallen.

The social life of a playlist

Last November Patrick Dax of ORF, Austria's public service broadcaster, interviewed me in Vienna about Net, Blogs and Rock'n'Roll. It was the best set of interview questions I've ever had (taking nothing away from Patrick here, but I have to admit it's not like I've done hundreds of interviews) and a great discussion on a miserably rainy day — if you read German, here's the interview.

Yesterday Patrick sent me a handful of questions about online playlist service in general and muxtape in particular. Here's the article he's written (in German). And here, for non German readers, are my full responses to his questions:

How do you like muxtape?

I think muxtape did for playlist sharing what the original Google did for search: it seems to strip away all the complexity and just focus on doing the core things really well. In the case of playlists that means letting people easily hear full-track versions of all the songs on the list.

Muxtape doesn't have social networking features or anything else built in (apart from being able to 'scrobble' to Last.fm) — it relies on the users to supply their own social context, just by passing around muxtape URLs in emails and twitterfeeds etc.

Some people might wish it were possible to embed their muxtapes in their MySpace profile/blog/etc.

Three strikes struck off?

Four months ago lots of people were getting worked up about the possibility that the UK Government might somehow enforce a "three strikes and you're out" policy for Internet filesharers. I was asked to write an opinion piece about it myself, but more about that in a bit. At that time, the BPI — the organisation that represents major record labels in the UK — was quoted as favouring a "we do the policing, you send the letters" deal with ISPs, and as saying "we've been asking ISPs for more than 18 months to introduce a system to warn their customers (twice) before pulling the plug on them. But we haven't had much success and our faith in negotiations is running thin."

Four months on, and it's interesting to see how a BPI deal with the Virgin Media ISP is being reported. The deal is for an "education campaign" that will see users who share files illegally receive, not a warning or a disconnection notice, but "practical advice on how to prevent internet account misuse, links to legitimate sites and the potential dangers… of viruses and spyware." This last quote is from Music Week coverage [subscription required], which hails it as "a giant leap forward in [the BPI's] efforts to stop illegal file-sharing on the internet by signing a landmark deal" (my emphasis). I don't know about you, but after all that sabre-rattling, sending out letters politely informing criminals (in heavy quote marks) that there are alternatives to crime seems like quite a comedown.

Clearly the game isn't over yet, and — to mix my metaphors — one creates hostages to fortune by projecting that the winner of a battle will be the winner of the war. But that's perhaps my main point, because there is a lot of pressure both in mainstream media and in blogs to get worked up into a lather and over-react to minor or short-term skirmishes. I wrote about this under the title of slow blogging on my DJ Alchemi blog recently. As with the Radiohead hoo-ha that I referenced there, I suspect that the whole three-strikes ruckus will, with hindsight, seem like a minor skirmish in the broader sweep of events. (The fuss was whipped up over the implication that the Government, not just the BPI, was in favour of regulating for three-strikes — but firm evidence of this support didn't exist then, and hasn't appeared since.)

With that preface, here is what I wrote on 12 February, trying to anticipate the different ways the scenario might play out, and to analyse the deeper trends that this skirmish brought to the surface. It was commissioned by the Daily Telegraph though they didn't run it in the end.

Read more of Net, Blogs and Rock'n'Roll on Amazon.com

The Amazon.com page for Net, Blogs and Rock'n'Roll now has Amazon's Search Inside features enabled. This means you can see the full Table of Contents and Index of the book. Perhaps more interestingly, you can also read the first six pages of Chapter 1 of the book (it stops very suddenly after six pages, but don't ask me, I don't control these things!) So add that to the Preface which is already freely and fully available on this site, and you've got the first 15 pages of the book. Search Inside is not available on the Amazon.co.uk page or other Amazon sites yet.

Fans will be the most comprehensive curators

There's a section in my book called "Creating and Curating the Archive" where I wrote,

In future, if they’re not already, fan communities will quickly become the most authoritative archivists for the artists they follow. They collect memorabilia and ephemera — from ticket stubs to magazine interviews and amateur bootleg recordings — that most people would dismiss as tat… As well as memorabilia, these items will include what are currently rare and hard-to-find audio and video recordings, which will be collected by both human foraging and automated 'sweeping' of the Net. Expert fans will catalogue them and record their digital fingerprints, to help identify whether further discoveries are duplicates or new additions to the archive.

Many of my projections in this area were based on observing the way Andy Aldridge has developed the Head Full of Wishes fansite for Galaxie 500 and associated 'downstream' acts. I profiled Andy in the book and also in this interview.

Yesterday Andy posted to the Head Full of Wishes mailing list about a new tagging framework he's created for the site. This enables him to ensure that his site is able firstly to collect details of everything that's out there on the Net and is connected to Galaxie 500, and secondly to organise and present that information in a coherent way. As he wrote,

I did this because I was finding interesting stuff "out there", tagging it in delicious and it was quietly getting lost now I can "catalogue" everything — if I find a video on youtube of Dean & Britta doing Tugboat [a Galaxie 500 song] in London (I wish) I can tag it with the relevant show and track tags and it will always be available of the page of that show (and that track)…

Rough notes: two recent music events

There are a few rules of thumb I use to filter what I write on this site. The first is that it must have some bearing on the themes of digital discovery in Net, Blogs and Rock'n'Roll, the book. The second is that I don't really do 'news' items here, unless I come across something that I believe deserves higher profile than it's likely to get from other channels. If you want news, you're better off going to a site that specialises: I use mediaor (built by Jason Herskowitz), which aggregates material from about a hundred music news and discovery sites (including this one!). Thirdly, I always try and add something new to the 'raw data' in terms of analysis or insight — or, when I'm lacking insight, attitude.

But often I don't have time to digest what I take in, or to compose my thoughts. That's life, and we all probably feel that way, so no complaints. But I'm always experimenting with ways to make something useful out of the undigested stuff, to provide a 'light touch' way of passing things on. The 'recently noted elsewhere' stream on the right of this page is one example of that, based on a subset of my Furl archive. Another thing I do is take rough notes at the conferences, lectures and other events I attend. I'm trying out using my Vox blog to make these available in unedited form. The notes are rough, messy and come with health warnings about accuracy. But have a peek and see if you find these two examples useful:

• Music Connected — AIM independent label event last week, including Paul Brindley's state-of-the-digital-industry review and a panel on ad-supported models;
• Celestial Jukebox: free streams or pipe dreams? — Music Tank event yesterday, with keynote from Last.fm and responses from labels, rights organisations and technologists.

If you're feeling nosey, there's also a mix of other personal stuff on the same blog (and if you become a friend of mine on Vox, there's even more embarrassing stuff).