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Matching entries from DJ Alchemi
Applying the lessons of Last.fm to libraries and learning
If fans can discover interesting new music by comparing their listening profiles with those of people with similar tastes, why not apply similar principles to students' discovery of books as they explore how to get the most from university libraries....
The Age of the Free MP3 Player
This is the season where many bloggers are providing their predictions for the year ahead. I tend to opt out of these because a year is both too long and too short to foresee many types of change, which are...
Does the nature of social networks limit their growth?
One idea in John Naughton's 02007 round-up/02008 predictions struck me: that social networks like MySpace and Facebook "are likely to peak because ego-centric social networking is intrinsically limiting: after you've 'befriended' everyone you know, what else is there to do?"....
Give me back my tags: portable attention data
Having recently moved and been caught up in a silly broadband snafu, I spent a couple of weeks without regular Internet access: the previous entry on this blog was composed in the local pub, which offers free wi-fi along with...
Last.fm makes personal radio stations easily shareable
I like this. In the new beta version of Last.fm, you can now share different playlists with others via an embedded Flash player, like this: That playlist is my 'loved tracks' on Last.fm, but you can also hear all the...
Back in the blogging seat
After a couple of months of inactivity blog-wise, I'm returning to the scene, and hoping I haven't lost everyone who used to visit here. I've actually been back in action since the beginning of the month, but mostly on other...
Just what the world needs: another music wiki
I checked the Alexa traffic ranking for this site last week, and it's down 60% in the last three months… I will be emerging properly from hibernation in a couple of weeks, and livening things up around here. In the...
Trends and substitution between media platforms
Tell me if I'm misinterpreting this graph (based on an Ofcom report, via a BBC news story), but I think it's saying that the time young people spend on the net comes particularly at the expense of time they might...
Spoofing music recommendation services and personalised radio
Music recommendation services and personalised radio stations like Last.FM depend on tracking the behaviour and preferences of their users, and building personal profiles on the basis of this. So what happens if the data you feed into these services isn't...
Visualisation of music collections
The picture on the left is an annotated version of a possible visualisation of someone's music collection, as proposed and described in a research paper available from Musicstrands. The segments in the circle represent different genres of music within the...
Music recommendation data spread about
Having written last month about Pandora apparently opening up, and having drawn comparisons with Last.fm, two music services have licensed some of the Last.fm data to add recommendations to their sites. Download store and magazine site TuneTribe.com is perhaps the...
Is Pandora opening up?
There's an interesting press release about Pandora and Friendster hooking up together to bring a social dimension to Pandora's 'personal radio stations'. (The press release currently appears on Friendster's site, but not on Pandora's — not sure if there's any...
Yahoo: music and authenticity
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...
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...
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...
Discovering new music: rationality and randomness
Do you behave completely rationally when you buy music? These days it's a lot easier to base your purchases on sound evidence (pun unintentional). You can Google an artist you've heard of, check out their reviews in the press; read...
Growing the market for music as an experience
In his Musicworks keynote presentation last week, Sholto Ramsay argued that the music industry ought to stop thinking of music as a 'product' and more in terms of an experience. The corollary of that, he said, is that music should...
Creating legal independent music podcasts
The use of music in podcasts is a legal grey area, but there are an increasing number of tools and services that make it easier to source music legally, usually from 'unsigned' artists, creating a genuinely grassroots channel for independent...
Recommendations for enhancing iTunes' sharing features
Since my posting on research into iTunes music sharing, I've got a copy of the full paper and found time to read it on a recent train journey. Last time I focused on how people manage the impressions that others...
Downloading from the radio
Last week's MusicWeek had a article about UBC Media preparing to offer listeners to some of its digital (DAB) radio stations the opportunity to download the songs they broadcast. I can't find the exact story on the web, but here's...
What does On-Demand Media really mean?
This week Arbitron and Edison Media Research published a report of their research survey on Internet and multimedia usage, The On-demand Media Consumer. The headline result being quoted is that "One in ten Americans show a heavy preference to control...
Podcasting: another harbinger of martini media
Podcasting enables you to subscribe to regularly updated audio material, and then take it with you on your MP3 player and listen to it when it suits you (the term podcasting is clearly derived from iPods, but the practice is...
Preliminary sketch for online music listener research
What kind of data do you need to cut a swathe through all the commentators and tell you whether music download services are really going to spell the end of the album? Or whether on-demand features will change the...
The new gatekeepers for discovering music
As the means of accessing and consuming music change, so do the kinds of intermediaries who act as 'gatekeepers' controlling how listeners can discover new music. If you're shopping at the iTunes Music Store, surfing among thousands of online radio...
Doubts about models for listening to music in the future
I've been reflecting more on my claim that online radio is the model for listening to music in the future, helped by a range of exchanges with others. Being sceptical I've so far come up with four types of...
Why online radio is the model for listening to music in the future
At the RSA Music and Technology Event last month, Paul Sanders of State 51 described a scenario ten years from now where more music than you could listen to in a lifetime will be available on demand wherever you...
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