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.