On 22 Mar 2007, at 13:34, Jussi Lehtonen wrote:
On Thu, 22 Mar 2007, Martin Dust wrote:
You also have to remember that most distributors don't have the
passion we have, they are simply box shifters who will treat your
wares like fruit and veg.
Yes, most likely the only way to get them interested is to offer a
unique competition value over other distributors (getting random
music listeners, connoisseurs etc. as customers). It's still a
fruit and veg store, but instead of dryed parsnip they could sell
fresh juniper berries. :)
It's a romantic analogy and a nice one at that but it holds no water
in the business world.
An interesting development towards user friendly music search,
utilizing tags and metafiles, would be to combine for example:
- active community functions (last.fm, 313-list)
- personal up-to-date information (discogs' collections and
wantlists) - music rating - system would analyze a piece of music
according to it's metadata and mayhaps even waveform, and the
users would thet rate it according to their taste (even random
music rating would improve the accuracy)
Good, but it doesn't always work and being recommend things by a
"computer" does get peoples back up. What you need is some human
intervention, things we can trust.
That was the "active community functions" mentioned above. "Accept
recommendations from people you trust", in a similar vein
spamassassin does. For example while pulling information from this
list, I'd probably soon notice whose record recommendations I would
keep in the system's peer list, and whose I'd drop out because they
have too different taste in music. So the basic idea with this is
that along with one's friends in music there's a lot of human
generated information out there, but it needs to be sorted out. A
lot of clutter nowadays.
The problem with this is it isn't scalable, it's proven not to work
and open to abuse, see myspace for a working example and Tivo for
another. Last fm have got pretty close but again it's still open to
abuse and requires people to search, which most don't.
The other point would be that I want exposing to new stuff, I don't
just want the stuff I already like. This list for example has
switched me on to some stuff I would have never looked at, the same
with woebot.tv - you can't automate it...
m
