Brian Whitman,one of the founders of the Echo Nest, gave a provocative talk last week at Music and Bits.  Some excerpts:

Useless MIR Problems:

• Genre Identification – “Countless PhDs on this useless task. Trying to teach a computer a marketing construct”

Hard but interesting MIR Problems:

• Finding the saddest song in the world
• Predicting Pitchfork and All Music Guide ratings
• Predicting the gender of a listener based upon their music taste

On Recommendation:

• “The best music experience is still very manual… I am still reading about music, not using a recommender.”
• “If we only used collaborative filtering to discover music, the popular artists would eat the unknowns alive.”
• “The SQL Join is destroying music”

Brian’s notes on the talk are on his blog.  The slides are online here. Highly recommended: