Academics Plan the Celectial Jukebox

Was just looking at Paul Lamere’s list of accepted papers for the ISMIR conference and they are amazing. The academics are once again showing the executives how innovative thinking can move the industry towards solving users practical problems and create new business opportunities along the way.

At least the academics have really begun to build the tools that will make the celestial jukebox and unlimited music locker a commercially viable and practical product. Which is kinda funny when you think about it because thats actually the job of the Harvard MBA’s in the executives suites collecting big checks. If you work in or around media, these are the papers you should probably read and use to guide your thinking about the industry. Marketing, especially for media, will be largely algorithmic and these are some of the early experiments in creating the algorithms that will result in discovery and hopefully sales.

The papers that look the most promising:
– A Comparison Of Signal-Based Music Recognitionmmendation to Genre Labels, Collaborative Filtering, Musicological Analysis, Human Recommendation, and Random Baseline Terence Magno and Carl Sable

– Armonique: Experiments In Content-Based Similarity Retrieval Using Power-Law Melodic and Timbre Metrics Bill Manaris, Dwight Krehbiel, Patrick Roos and Thomas Zalonis

– Moodswings: A Collaborative Game For Music Mood Label Collection Youngmoo Kim, Erik Schmidt and Lloyd Emelle

– Oh Oh Oh Whoah! Towards Automatic Topic Detection In Song Lyrics Florian Kleedorfer, Peter Knees and Tim Pohle

-Social Playlists and Bottleneck Measurements : Exploiting Musician Social Graphs Using Content-Based Dissimilarity and Pairwise Maximum

I wasnt able to find a couple of them but if f anyone has any of these papers I would love to see them or if your blogging from the conference could you please post or email me a link.

Michael Robertson’s Music Locker Smackdown

Lala.com, an online CD trading platform, began offering a limited music locker with free music streaming this week and it pissed off uber-CEO and music locker competitor Michael Robertson. The general reaction to Lala.com’s announcement ranged from the mildly bemused to the historically reflective with most blog post and articles mentioning Mp3.com or Napster as parallels. That wasnt enough for the Michael “lightening will strike as many time as I say” Robertson, who promptly posted a pretty damning “expose” of the details not mentioned in any of the post about Lala.com’s new service.