There is a lot going on in the digital content world: Google buys Youtube, Netflix opens up a contest for the best dvd liking prediction, Choicestream wonders that anybody would be still looking for new algorithms – since they have the best , Google mixes with Apple again and so on- what’s it all about?
Finding the best way to get the customer to buy more digital content!
Being in the automated playlisting business ourselves we know a lot about the dilemmas the industry faces – here Steve Johnson from Choicestream is absolutely right: just producing recommendation using collaborative filtering isn’t good enough any more. And it really doesn’t make that much of a difference if either you want a website to recommend a set of tracks to you or get your iPod to automatically play music in a sequence that you will like.
We thought too – and we see the biggest problem with the existing systems: filtering becomes boring after a very short while. But just good algorithms(such as ours) are no good without data either – we’re just lucky that we can use almost any available data from any kind of database.
Have you ever used Pandora? It’s is really a nice tool, they must have a remarkable database of acoustical and other metadata and once you tell Pandora what you like, it spits out a stream of similar music tracks, hoping that they will enjoy. It does do both- it let’s you enjoy music while it’s playing and recommends music for buying at the same time.
Well the results definetly amaze but after a short while these very similar sounding songs become boring and you have to choose a new favorite that Pandora can use as filter.
You can do that to the average customer but we are in b2b. Background music, POS radio, public acoustic, music on demand systems for areas where a lot of people spend quite some time in, need a bit more consideration, don’t they?
Just imagine yourself sitting in a wonderfull restaurant where the mix of the background music is awfull? You go early and you never come back. Imagine that restaurant to be on a holiday island or a cruise liner! And you are stuck with it for the next 2 weeks.
Well this is our business, invent and develop systems that make you feel comfortable as a customer when listening to music in public, that help you as a customer to explore product catalogues, music libraries- and at the same time enjoy the output of online radios and other streams.
