Sunday, November 27, 2011

Scrobble my mood

I'm back on Last.fm after a long stint on Spotify. I have paid for the premium services of both in the past, but both are disappointing in one area: knowing what to play next. Spotify makes you choose your own tracks (the Radio functionality is useless), which is simple but very limited. I barely discover new music on Spotify, it's usually just from searching for things I've heard elsewhere. Occasionally I will discover something new by listening to compilation albums which contain tracks I've searched for, but that's about the limit of it.

Last.fm, by contrast, makes it almost impossible not to discover new stuff unless you only listen to your Library or Loved Tracks all the time. But the piece of functionality that should do exactly what I want (click-free music that I want to listen to for hours) is the Recommended Radio, and it's not great. Which is surprising, because it knows everything I have listened to for the last few years, as I've scrobbled even my Spotify listening.

So what's the problem? Inappropriate tracks. I don't mean offensive, I mean not matching my mood. Some artist radio stations are good matches for my mood and don't end up playing me rubbish; Rob Dougan is one, but mostly because it plays me lots of Rob Dougan, who is just excellent, particularly at work.

My mood is very variable, and the music has to fit it or I'll just switch it off. At the same time, I usually want the music to just play without me needing to babysit it. On Spotify, I tend to play specific playlists built up over weeks or months of selections and deletions. On Last, playlists are nearly pointless (you can't just play a playlist until it has a very large number of tracks in it, so you never actually build them up), so I end up playing tag or artist radio.

I've never worked out, however, whether playing the Uptempo tag radio will be the same for me as for someone else - does it take my tastes into account?

Idea: Do mood-matching to link my scrobbles
If I listen to a load of tracks in one go, and I skip some of them before they scrobble, then I'm probably in a particular mood, especially if some of those I skip are loved tracks; it's not that I don't like the track, I just don't want to listen to it now. Thus, we have more meta about this collection of tracks; they are probably mood-related. So instead of making me work out playlists for myself, or cast myself to the winds of tag or artist radio, Last could do mood-specific recommendation.

The power of the Web 2+ world is to do algorithmic cleverness in order to deliver some very human requirement automatically. Google goes beyond mere links now, and personalises searches, fixing spelling mistakes and suggesting maps. Social networks have to handle my social segregation between close friends, acquaintances, family and work, without telling work I'm pregnant, or the matriarchy about my relationship status before I'm ready. Thus Last has done well to facilitate self-measurement (scrobbling), but they have some way to go to give me a set-and-forget radio station that works for me.

So for now, I stick to pop artist radio... the mainstream is at least inoffensive to the ear for the most part, and fairly peppy.

Tuesday, November 8, 2011

Re: The Great Apple Apartheid

My response to Alan, who wrote about Apple ignoring the needs of the poor or ill-connected when needing a fast internet connection for a software update to get iTunes functioning on his new machine.

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The demographic that can afford to buy Apple products is the demographic that has a fast internet connection. Apple does not target the poor, at all. Have you ever seen an Apple product priced to compete with cheap products? The only one I can think of is the shuffle, which is a lead-in for getting people to spend money on iTunes.

Alan, you speak of poverty, but people in actual poverty do not buy Apple products. They do not fit; you need to buy the product, and then pay for all the expensive stuff that goes with it – the fast internet connection, the expensive upgrades, the pay-for iTunes downloads. If you live on $100 a month, when are you going to buy into that kind of expenditure? Even the western poor on state benefits are likely to struggle. No, you buy a cheap PC, second or third hand, ideally with some linux flavour on it which will cost nothing to update bar the net connection, and which permits you to share music for free. Illegally if necessary. If I have a choice between a 5-year old run-of-the-mill car or a 12 year old Merc, I would be foolish to buy the Merc because it will cost far more to fix, far more to fuel etc. Particularly if no-one else around me owns a Merc.

Apple do not target the poor, because they are poor. They do not have the money that Apple wants, nor do they have the cachet that Apple makes use of. Its products are aspirational, status items. I suspect that any community whose internet connection is slow and/or expensive will share music via mp3s on usb sticks, not by paying a track at a time on iTunes. Just like we used to, when we had slow and expensive connections.

Apple is an immediate choice in your world, so your problem is the fragility of it. In the world of the poor, Apple is Prada, Gucci, Alienware, Steinway. Hey, Prada have a fashion event on, and the dress code is strings of pearls.

Monday, November 7, 2011

Flow

I had flow again, just for a few seconds, improvising on the violin.

Felt like a kind of bliss/fire up my spine.