dubious.biz(ness)

Wow, in my pursuit of new software I pulled up outside the invite-only beta of meemix and was excited. A combo of last.fm (which sorta sucks) and pandora (which also sucks). The real problem with these services is that they cannot translate from personalization to serendipity. You can hear more of what you said you like but making that jump from a Top-40 style radio station to music recommendation is difficult.

Pandora solves this by looking at the “genes” of the song and giving you more similar songs. For example if you rate a song with loud bass and a dynamic male vocalist, you’ll get more of that. But just because you like Akon doesn’t mean you like Usher. More importantly, just because you like Akon and/or Usher doesn’t mean you only want to hear similar songs. Pandora ends up being a music replacement service. If you liked x then you’ll probably think that y sounds exactly the same because a computer analyzed it and they it does.

Last.fm goes the social route, and is good up until a point. Despite making a lot of “long tail” noise, the bands that are popular are always in the fat end of the tail, not the long end. So if you like The Decemberists you get Santana. Nobody wants a music recommendation engine to recommend stuff they’ve already heard before.

Along comes meemix promising to combine these two. It analyzes the tracks algorithmically and matches you up with like-minded people. Two problems with this strategy: first, there is no community to match me to. So I have no friends to influence my taste. Second, the analysis is just plain stupid. It claims it takes in to account genre and dates, but I voted up a daft punk song and got a ska band I’d never heard of. I voted up the ska band and suddenly it decided I was in to death metal. Maybe the programmers are really in to that because the past 10 tracks have been: metal, metal, metal, metal, Madonna, metal, metal, Daft Punk, metal, Green Day. This is despite me down voting the metal and upvoting everything else.

I’m assuming that no idiot out there likes Madonna and metal, so I presume there must be something similar in the “genes” of the song. Fast beat, high pitched, dynamic… who knows? At any rate it sucks balls and I’ve had enough of babysitting it. Back to hype.

Ironically, the motto of this little startup: “Internet radio that gets you”. Bullet Bra with Butterfly Wings anybody?

So I’ve been really digging the mp3 blogs, particularly mp3 blog aggregator Hype Machine which I have posted about before.

I am now also roaming around a lot and I’m trying to keep some of my music with me where ever I go. I really want to share some of the great mixes and songs I’ve found but I don’t have the time nor the genius to come up with blog posts for each of them like most mp3 blogs do. So I decided to just share the music out to everyone, probably about 15 tracks at a time, building a playlist of what I think is hot at the moment. If you like the sound of it, search for it onhypem and read up on the track. Otherwise it should be a nice playlist. My first playlist is pretty dancy, or it will be when I finish putting tracks up on it. I’m just doing what I fancy as I find it right now. If you’re bored, take a listen, it’s over to the right and under the photos.

I’ve also cleaned up the sidebar and changed the title. As I’m not currently “going to college” and it’s strayed from that, I figured it would be a good time to change the title to something that reflects my ongoing life rather than just this stint, so goodbye “Going to College” and hello “Dubious.biz(ness)”.