Posts Tagged radio
Bipolar Radio
I just finished my hack for Music Hack Day SF. It is called Bipolar Radio. It is your standard Pandora-style artist radio but with a twist. Type in an artist, and you’ll get an endless stream of music by similar artists. When you need to hear a high energy song, just click on the yellow happy face and you’ll instantly hear a high energy song by the currently playing artist. Similarly, if you’d like to chill out, just click on the green face and you’ll instantly hear a low energy song that should help you relax a bit.
The hack uses the Echo Nest song data to help find the high and low energy songs. I use a combination of loudness, energy, danceability, and tempo to sort and filter the songs by an artist into the high and low energy buckets. I’m taking advantage of the new Rdio / Echo Nest integration to get Rdio IDs so I can play them in Rdio’s nifty player.
Give it a whirl and let me know what you think: Bipolar Radio
The Future of the Music Industry
Posted by Paul in Music, recommendation on November 1, 2009
Last week NPR’s On the Media had a special show called ‘The Future of Music’ – all about the current state of the music industry and where it is all going. The hour is broken into a number of sections:
- Facing the (Free) music – about what has happened in the 10 years since Napster – Yep Spotify gets a mention. Choice quote by Hilary Rosen – “Napster was a missed opportunity’
- They Say That I stole this – about the legalities of sampling (with interviews with Girl Talk among others)
- Played Out – interview with John Scher about the state of live music
- Teens on Tunes – interviews with teens about where they get their music. Answer: Limewire
- Charting the Charts – interesting piece about the charts – the history of billboard, and the next generation of tracking including an interview with Bandmetrics founder Duncan Freeman (way to go Duncan!)
- Why I’m not afraid to take your money – interesting interview with Amanda Palmer about how artists make money in today’s music world
One thing that they didn’t talk about at all was music discovery – no mention of the role of the critic, music blogs, hype machine, no discussion of the role social sites like last.fm play in music discovery, no mention of automated tools for music discovery like recommenders and playlisters. Maybe next year, when everyone has access to infinite music, we’ll see more emphasis on discovery tools.
It was a great show. Highly recommended: NPR’s On the Media Special Edition: The Future of the Music Industry
Radio Waves
Posted by Paul in data, Music, visualization on October 1, 2009
Radio Labs now has a new visualisation called Radio Waves that shows the kind of music that is played on the various BBC stations. The visualization shows info about what genres, artists, year of release, which DJs play which music. There’s lots of info presented in an interesting way. Read all the details at the Radio Labs blog and then check it out: Radio Waves
Music Machinery 