Music search tools target tastes
Published: 12 Dec 2003 11:20 GMT
Their assumption was that using so many attributes might result in some surprising but still interesting recommendations, such as finding a rock lover a jazz song that matched his tastes in almost every respect other than genre, for example.
Soundflavor is launching Thursday with information on just 4,000 songs in its database, largely focused on alternative rock. This is because its initial test customers were rock radio stations, Budlong said. That database will expand as new songs are analysed, the company says.
A Soundflavor account is free; people pay for the songs they download or CDs purchased.
Relying on human ears is expensive, as previous companies have found, however. Listen.com once employed a large staff of musicians to rate and review songs but ultimately laid most off, as the company's funds dwindled.
Ultimately, Siren hopes to strike relationships with song-distribution services such as iTunes, Napster or RealNetwork's Rhapsody. It may also ask music labels to pay for the costs of analysing their music, if they want their music in the recommendation database more quickly, Budlong said.
Those revenues are important for business reasons. But that also raises the danger of turning ostensibly objective recommendation tools into the equivalent of paid search, where advertisers or sponsors get favoured treatment, Gartner's McGuire said.
"It will be interesting to see how immune or roped off the system is from the pernicious effect of things like paid search and advertising," McGuire said. "They will need to go to great pains to let people know that there is money exchanging hands."
Previous
Did you find this article useful?
150 out of 271 people found this useful
Digg
Slashdot
Del.ici.ous
Stumble
Reddit
