This weekend I’ll be heading out to San Francisco to attend the SanFran MusicTech Summit. The summit is a gathering of musicians, suits, lawyers, and techies with a focus on the convergence of music, business, technology and the law. There’s quite a set of music tech luminaries that will be in attendance, and the schedule of panels looks fantastic.
I’ll be moderating a panel on Music Recommendation Services. There are some really interesting folks on the panel: Stephen White from Gracenote, Alex Lascos from BMAT, James Miao from the Sixty One and Michael Papish from Media Unbound. I’ve been on a number of panels in the last few years. Some have been really good, some have been total train wrecks. The train wrecks occur when (1) panelists have an opportunity to show powerpoint slides, (2) a business-oriented panelist decides that the panel is just another sales call, (3) the moderator loses control and the panel veers down a rat hole of irrelevance. As moderator, I’ll try to make sure the panel doesn’t suck .. but already I can tell from our email exchanges that this crew will be relevant, interesting and funny. I think the panel will be worth attending.
We are already know some of the things that we want to talk about in the panel:
- Does anyone really have a problem finding new music? Is this a problem that needs to be solved?
- What makes a good music recommendation?
- What’s better – a human or a machine recommender?
- Problems in high stakes evaluations
And some things that we definitely do not want to talk about:
- Business models
- Music industry crisis
If you are attending the summit, I hope you’ll attend the panel.
Music Machinery 
#1 by Don Kazek on May 14, 2009 - 3:51 pm
Love to go unfortunately my expense account is not what it used to be!
The discussion does any one really need recommedation would be an interesting one.
After reading a recent study undertaken by PRS in the UK where hit-heavy, skinny-tail music consumption was observed in both legal and illegal downloads it is i would venture to suggest a discussion worth having. I personally would use a recommendation engine that uses genuine cybernetic processes that result in semiotic outputs i may however be in the minority.
#2 by Daniel Gärtner on May 17, 2009 - 6:02 am
> Does anyone really have a problem finding new music?
> Is this a problem that needs to be solved?
Well … why cars, I can go from A to B with my horse.
I currently (and this for years now) get my music recommendation mainly from music magazines, friends, and blogs. These are all human created recommendations, and I appreciate them a lot. Sometimes, when a friend tells me to check out an artist, I wonder how it could happen, that I’ve never heard of this particular artist before, and I start listening to music of this artist because I like it. And I believe there is a lot more music out there, I would enjoy to listen to, but I don’t know the artists, the songs yet. Ok, not a real problem that necessarily needs to be solved – but a nice to have. And here, music recommendation services can help in the future, but there is still a lot of things to do. Currently recommendation services don’t tell me something new (CF), or they tell me something strange (CB). And we must not forget another side of the story: Recommendation services will hopefully help an unknown artist to get the audience he deserves.