Archive for August, 2011
How do you discover music?
Posted by Paul in Music, recommendation, research on August 18, 2011
I’m interested in learning more about how people are discovering new music. I hope that you will spend 2 mins and take this 3 question poll. I’ll publish the results in a few weeks.
Searching for chilled metal
It seems like every heavy metal band has at least one chill-out song – from Metallica’s Nothing Else Matters to Led Zeppelin’s That’s the Way. These tracks give some relief from the otherwise relentless pounding of the hammer of the gods. It’d be nice to be able to collect up a bunch of these chilled-metal songs into a playlist – perfect for when your mom’s visiting (she tells me that she doesn’t like pounding metal).
ChilLed Zeppelin - Some rights (by-nc-sa) reserved by Heinrich Klaffs
To find chilled metal, we can use The Echo Nest API. The Echo Nest has calculated a wide range of acoustic and musical attributes for millions of songs. One such attribute is energy . We can make a simple song/search query for heavy metal songs that have low energy. These will be our chilled-metal songs that your mom enjoys so much. Here’s the API query:
http://developer.echonest.com/api/v4/song/search?&style=heavy+metal&sort=energy-asc
This query searches for songs by heavy metal artists, and sorts the results in order of ascending energy (so the lowest energy tracks will be returned first). The query does a really good job of finding chilled metal. Here’s a sampling of the results:
Sphinx (The Guardian) by Black Sabbath
Sphinx (The Guardian) by Black Sabbath - energy: 0.0003
Demon Driver reprise by Gillan
Demon Drive by Gillan - energy: 0.010
The Return by Saxon
The Return by Saxon - energy: 0.013
Solitude by Judas Priest
Solitude by Judas Priest - energy: 0.049
Joan of Arc by UFO
Joan of Arc by UFO – Energy: 0.05
Fear by Black Label Society
Fear by Black Label Society – Energy – 0.119
You can also use the Echo Nest Playlist API to generate a chilled metal playlist. Here’s a call to create a playlist of chilled metal in XSPF format.
You can toss this playlist into a player like VLC or Songbird that supports XSPF and start listening to chilled metal right away (30 second samples only) like this:
% curl 'http://developer.echonest.com/api/v4/playlist/static?api_key=N6E4NIOVYMTHNDM8J\ &style=heavy+metal&max_energy=.1\ &type=artist-description&bucket=id:7digital&bucket=tracks&limit=true\ &format=xspf' > chilled-metal.xspf
% open chilled-metal.xspf
There you go, you now have all the tools you need to keep your chilled metal queue filled and fresh, almost everything you need to keep your mom happy.
Thanks much to 7Digital for providing audio clips and album art.
Loudest songs in the world
Posted by Paul in fun, Music, The Echo Nest on August 17, 2011
Lots of ink has been spilled about the Loudness war and how modern recordings keep getting louder as a cheap method of grabbing a listener’s attention. We know that, in general, music is getting louder. But what are the loudest songs? We can use The Echo Nest API to answer this question. Since the Echo Nest has analyzed millions and millions of songs, we can make a simple API query that will return the set of loudest songs known to man. (For the hardcore geeks, here’s the API query that I used). Note that I’ve restricted the results to those in the 7Digital-US catalog in order to guarantee that I’ll have a 30 second preview for each song.
So without further adieu, here are the loudest songs
Topping and Core by Grimalkin555
The song Topping and Core by Grmalking555 has a whopping loudness of 4.428 dB.
Modifications by Micron
The song Modifications by Micron has a loudness of 4.318 dB.
Hey You Fuxxx! by Kylie Minoise
The song Hey You Fuxxx! by Kylie Minoise with a loudness of 4.231 dB
Here’s a little taste of Kylie Minoise live (you may want to turn down your volume)
War Memorial Exit by Noma
The song War Memorial Exit by Noma with a loudness of 4.166 dB
Hello Dirty 10 by Massimo
The song Hello Dirty 10 by Massimo with a loudness of 4.121 dB.
These songs are pretty niche. So I thought it might be interesting to look the loudest songs culled from the most popular songs. Here’s the query to do that. The loudest popular song is:
Welcome to the Jungle by Guns 'N Roses
The loudest popular song is Welcome to the Jungle by Guns ‘N Roses with a loudness of -1.931 dB.
You may be wondering how a loudness value can be greater than 0dB. Loudness is a complex measurement that is both a function of time and frequency. Unlike traditional loudness measures, The Echo Nest analysis models loudness via a human model of listening, instead of directly mapping loudness from the recorded signal. For instance, with a traditional dB model a simple sinusoidal function would be measured as having the same exact “amplitude” (in dB) whether at 3KHz or 12KHz. But with The Echo Nest model, the loudness is lower at 12KHz than it is at 3KHz because you actually perceive those signals differently.
Thanks to the always awesome 7Digital for providing album art and 30 second previews in this post.
25 SXSW Music Panels worth voting for
Posted by Paul in events, Music, The Echo Nest on August 16, 2011
Yesterday, SXSW opened up the 2012 Panel Picker allowing you to vote up (or down) your favorite panels. The SXSW organizers will use the voting info to help whittle the nearly 3,600 proposals down to 500. I took a tour through the list of music related panel proposals and selected a few that I think are worth voting for. Talks in green are on my “can’t miss this talk” list. Note that I work with or have collaborated with many of the speakers on my list, so my list can not be construed as objective in any way.
There are many recurring themes. Turnatable.fm is everywhere. Everyone wants to talk about the role of the curator in this new world of algorithmic music recommendations. And Spotify is not to be found anywhere!
I’ve broken my list down into a few categories:
Social Music – there must be a twenty panels related to social music. (Eleven(!) have something to do with Turntable.fm) My favorites are:
- Social Music Strategies: Viral & the Power of Free – with folks from MOG, Turntable, Sirius XM, Facebook and Fred Wilson. I’m not a big fan of big panels (by the time you get done with the introductions, it is time for Q&A), but this panel seems stacked with people with an interesting perspective on the social music scene. I’m particularly interested in hearing the different perspectives from Turntable vs. Sirius XM.
- Can Social Music Save the Music Industry? – Rdio, Turntable, Gartner, Rootmusic, Songkick – Another good lineup of speakers (Turntable.fm is everywhere at SXSW this year) exploring social music. Curiously, there’s no Spotify here (or as far as I can tell on any talks at SXSW).
- Turntable.fm the Future of Music is Social - Turntable.fm – This is the turntable.fm story.
- Reinventing Tribal Music in the land of Earbuds - AT&T – this talk explores how music consumption changes with new social services and the technical/sociological issues that arise when people are once again free to choose and listen to music together.
Man vs. Machine – what is the role of the human curator in this age of algorithmic recommendation and music. Curiously, there are at least 5 panel proposals on this topic.
- Music Discovery:Man Vs. Machine – MOG, KCRW, Turntable.fm, Heather Browne
- Music/Radio Content: Tastemakers vs. Automation – Slacker
- Editor vs. Algorithm in the Music Discovery Space – SPIN, Hype Machine, Echo Nest, 7Digital
- Curation in the age of mechanical recommendations – Matt Ogle / Echo Nest – This is my pick for the Man vs. Machine talk. Matt is *the* man when it comes to understanding what is going on in the world of music listening experience.
- Crowding out the Experts – Social Taste Formation – Last.fm, Via, Rolling Stone - Is social media reducing the importance of reviewers and traditional cultural gatekeepers? Are Yelp, Twitter, Last.fm and other platforms creating a new class of tastemakers?
Music Discovery – A half dozen panels on music recommendation and discovery. Favs include:
- YouKnowYouWantIt: Recommendation Engines that Rock - Netflix, Pandora, Match.com – this panel is filled with recommendation rock stars
- The Dark Art of Digital Music Recommendations - Rovi – Michael Papish of Rovi promises to dive under the hood of music recommendation.
- No Points for Style: Genre vs. Music Networks – SceneMachine – Any talk proposal with statements like “Genre uses a 19th-century tool — a Darwinian tree — to solve a 21st-century problem. And unlike evolutionary science, it’s subjective. By the time a genre branch has been labeled (viz. “grunge”), the scene it describes is as dead as Australopithecus.” is worth checking out.
Mobile Music – Is that a million songs in your pocket or are you just glad to see me?
- Music Everywhere: Are we there yet? – Soundcloud, Songkick, Jawbone – Have we arrived at the proverbial celestial jukebox? What are the challenges?
Big Data – exploring big data sets to learn about music
- Data Mining Music - Paul Lamere – Shameless self promotion. What can we learn if we have really deep data about millions of songs?
- The Wisdom of Thieves: Meaning in P2P Behavior - Ben Fields – Don’t miss Ben’s talk about what we can learn about music (and other media) from mining P2P behavior. This talk is on my must see list.
- Big data for Everyman: Help liberate the data serf - Splunk – webifying and exploiting big data
Echo Nesty panels – proposals from folks from the nest. Of course, I recommend all of these fine talks.
- Active Listening – Tristan Jehan - Tristan takes a look at how the music experience is changing now that the listener can take much more active control of the listening experience. There’s no one who understands music analysis and understanding better than Tristan.
- Data Mining Music - Paul Lamere – This is my awesome talk about extracting info from big data sets like the Million Song Dataset. If you are a regular reader of this blog, you’ll know that I’ll be looking at things like click track detectors, passion indexes, loudness wars and son on.
- What’s a music fan worth? – Jim Lucchese - Echo Nest CEO takes a look at the economics of music, from iOS apps to musicians. Jim knows this stuff better than anyone.
- Music Apps Gone Wild – Eliot Van Buskirk – Eliot takes a tour of the most advanced, wackiest music apps that exist — or are on their way to existing.
- Curation in the age of mechanical recommendations – Matt Ogle – Matt is a phenomenal speaker and thinker in the music space. His take on the role of the curator in this world of algorithms is at the top of my SXSW panel list.
- Editor vs. Algorithm in the Music Discovery Space - SPIN, Hype Machine, Echo Nest (Jim Lucchese), 7Digital
- Defining Music Discovery through Listening – Echo Nest (Tristan Jehan), Hunted Media - This session will examine “true” music discovery through listening and how technology is the facilitator.
Miscellaneous topics
- Designing Future Music Experiences – Rdio, Turntable, Mary Fagot – A look at the user experience for next generation music apps.
- Music at the App Store: Lessons from Eno and Björk – Are albums as apps gimmicks or do they provide real value?
- Participatory Culture: The Discourse of Pitchfork – An analysis of ten years of music writing to extract themes.
Data Mining Music – a SXSW 2012 Panel Proposal
Posted by Paul in data, events, Music, music information retrieval, The Echo Nest on August 15, 2011
I’ve submitted a proposal for a SXSW 2012 panel called Data Mining Music. The PanelPicker page for the talk is here: Data Mining Music. If you feel so inclined feel free to comment and/or vote for the talk. I promise to fill the talk with all sorts of fun info that you can extract from datasets like the Million Song Dataset.
Here’s the abstract:
Data mining is the process of extracting patterns and knowledge from large data sets. It has already helped revolutionized fields as diverse as advertising and medicine. In this talk we dive into mega-scale music data such as the Million Song Dataset (a recently released, freely-available collection of detailed audio features and metadata for a million contemporary popular music tracks) to help us get a better understanding of the music and the artists that perform the music.
We explore how we can use music data mining for tasks such as automatic genre detection, song similarity for music recommendation, and data visualization for music exploration and discovery. We use these techniques to try to answers questions about music such as: Which drummers use click tracks to help set the tempo? or Is music really faster and louder than it used to be? Finally, we look at techniques and challenges in processing these extremely large datasets.
Questions answered:
- What large music datasets are available for data mining?
- What insights about music can we gain from mining acoustic music data?
- What can we learn from mining music listener behavior data?
- Who is a better drummer: Buddy Rich or Neil Peart?
- What are some of the challenges in processing these extremely large datasets?
Flickr photo CC by tristanf
Amazon strikes back
Last month we saw how Amazon had to change its Kindle iOS app to comply with Apple’s TOS. Amazon eliminated the ‘Kindle Store’ button making it harder for Kindle readers to purchase books. Today, Amazon has fought back by releasing the Amazon Kindle Cloud Reader - A pure HTML5 web application for reading books. The cloud reader lets you do anything that the native Kindle app does, including offline reading. And, since HTML5 apps are not subject to Apple’s TOS, the Kindle Cloud Reader brings back integration with the Kinde Store.
This may ultimately become the most viable route for music subscription services as well. Instead of creating native iOS apps, music services may look to create rich web apps instead. HTML5 is certainly capable enough, and soon audio support and local caching will be mature enough to support even the most sophisticated music listening app. MOG has already converted their main application to HTML5. I suspect more will follow suit. As HTML5 improves, we may see an exodus away from iOS. The more you tighten your grip, Apple, the more applications will slip through your fingers.
How are music services responding to Apple’s new TOS?
Posted by Paul in Music, recommendation on August 4, 2011
There’s been quite a bit of turmoil around how IOS developers can sell products and subscriptions within their IOS application. Apple says, essentially, if you sell stuff within your app you have to give Apple a 30% cut and you can’t try to pass costs onto the customer by charging more for items purchased within an App. The cost for an item must be the same whether it was purchased through the app or through some other means. Update: In June, MacRumors reported that Apple updated its TOS so that content providers are now also free to charge whatever price they wish for content purchased outside of an App. Apple also says that you can no longer have a button or a link in your app to a website where a user can purchase content without giving Apple their 30% cut.
For most media industries,there is not enough left of the profit pie to allow Apple to take 30% of it. This has left most media companies in a quandary of how to continue to give their users a good experience, without bankrupting their company. Many folks looked toward Amazon to see how they would react. Amazon’s Kindle reader is used by millions of iPad and iPhone readers to purchase and read digital books. Amazon’s solution was simple. Last week they issued an update to their Kindle Reader IOS app that removed the Kindle Store button. After the update, The [Kindle Store] button is no longer present in the app. This means that users of the Kindle IOS app can no longer launch a book shopping session from within the Kindle app. Here’s the update:
Before the update, the Kindle app looks like this, with a very visible Kindle Store button that will take you to the Kindle web store, where you can buy Kindle books:
After the update, the Kindle App looks like this. The Kindle Store button is gone.
What are music services doing?
I was curious to see how various music subscription services were dealing with the same issue. I fired up the apps, checked for updates and this is what I found.
Spotify
Spotify updated their app to get rid of any in-app purchases or subscription links just like the Kindle. You can only listen to Spotify mobile if you already have a Spotify mobile account.
When you login to Spotify there is no option to register an account. Spotify just assumes that you have already registered and are ready to login in and start using the app:
Curiously, there is a ‘Get help at Spotify.com’ button on the More page of the app. This will open a web browser and bring you to the Spotify Help page, which puts you two clicks away from a ‘subscribe’ button. This must cut pretty close to Apple’s rules about links to web sites.
SiriusXM
As with Spotify, SiriusXM, removed any links back to their site. Only people that already have a SiriusXM account can use the SiriusXM app.
Rhapsody
Same story for Rhapsody, there’s no way to get a subscription for Rhapsody within the Rhapsody Application.
MOG
MOG issued in update in July that removed links to the MOG subscription portal.
Napster
Interestingly enough, the very latest version of Napster happily allows you to register for Napster through the application. On the Sign In page there is a prominent Register for Napster button.
Pressing the button brings you to a Registration page where you can sign up for a 7-day free trial
I wonder what happens if a 7-day free trial user converts to a paying subscriber. Does Apple get 30% or is Napster hoping that no one notices?
Update - A Napster update was released one day after this post was published that eliminates the direct signup link:
Slacker
Slacker’s $3.99 a month Radio Plus product is included as a prominent upgrade in the Slacker app. If you hit the upgrade button you will get a form to fill out with all of your credit card info so they can start charging you the 4 bucks. The question is whether or not Apple is getting $1.20 of that 4 bucks.
Pandora
With Pandora you can create a free account through the mobile app, but there is no mention of a premium account, nor are there any links to Pandora.com as far as I can tell.
Last.fm
Just like Pandora, the Last.fm app will let you sign up for a non-premium account via the app and makes no mention or attempt to upsell you to a paid account:
Rdio
Rdio takes a similar approach to Pandora and Last.fm. It allows users to sign up for a 7 day free trial account via the app. It makes no mention and has no links to a premium subscription page. It is not clear to me what happens at the end of the trial period, whether they will prompt you to visit Rdio, or if they just say “Your free trial is over, thanks for listening”.
Update - It is a moving target out there. Rdio issued an update yesterday that now allows you to purchase a monthly subscription in the app. With the new version you can now click on the ‘Subscribe to Rdio Unlimited’. When you do you receive this confirmation dialog:
This allows you to purchase the Rdio subscription for $14.99, which just happens to be 33% more than an Rdio Unlimited subscription would cost if purchased directly from the web. Rdio is taking advantage of Apple’s recent relaxation of the rules and seeing how effective in-app subscription purchases stack up against cheaper out-of-app purchases. There’s a good LA Times article Rdio attempts to survive Apple’s subscription tax that describes Rdio’s approach to dealing with this issue.
A monthly Rdio Unlimited subscription is 33% cheaper when purchased on the web.
Playme
The latest version of Playme doesn’t have a button or link that brings you to the Playme subscription page. It does, however, display www.playme.com prominently on the sign in page so you can type the URL directly into your browser. I guess technically the words www.playme.com are not a link if you can’t click or tap it to go there.
Grooveshark
Grooveshark has never been timid of walking up to the line and stepping across it. The only way to get Grooveshark on an IOS device is to Jailbreak your device. With a Jailbroken version, Grooveshark doesn’t need to pay anyone for anything.
