There are different things that make a set of songs similar to one another. One of the things that we believe is important to song similarity is the context of the song. There are a few songs that remind you of something ("the songs I heard on spring break" or "stuff I listen to when I study").
Sometimes the relationships are hidden in the music, the lyrics, or a memory.
Sometimes it's even deeper.
Our goal at One Llama is to understand these relationships, by automatically analyzing the acoustic qualities of the music, the social "contextual" qualities of the music, and how music relates to each user differently.
Here's an example I often talk about to further explain the above point: Let's look for the opening theme for the TV show Scrubs (Superman by Lazlo Bane) on One Llama. Here's the playlist our recommendation engine generates. All the songs on this list have been featured in the show (Scrubs fans, enjoy!). Now all those songs together make a great playlist, but the common factor is not necessarily their sound features or lyrics. The common factor is the fact that those songs have been featured on the same TV show.
What factors do you think are important in deciding whether songs are similar are not? Is there a factor that you think is important (maybe not the most important, but deserves mention) and is normally ignored by recommendation engines? As usual, feel free to leave some comments!
Nikhil Pandit
One Llama Media, Inc.
http://www.onellama.com
Discover, Share, Roam Free!
2 comments:
Just a comment. It's really frustrating that you can only listen to 25 songs without upgrading to Rhapsody player. I was actively buying music that I was listening to until I got stopped on account of that. In this way, you're acting more like a business like itunes than a company focused on human "real-estate" like youtube.
Just some constructive criticism for the future. Except for that annoying quirk, pretty good.
Your itunes plugin doesn't work. I get the song playlists exported, but no song is played when I try to play it.
Overall, I think the way Onellama allows you to find music is great. However, your biggest and most debilitating problem is that it is REALLY HARD to actually listen to the music, which in the opinion of me and my colleagues who have tried it, makes the service effectively useless and has caused all of us to stop using it.
If you are able to MAKE SURE the music can be found & then easily heard... you'll be in great shape. If not, you'll be in deep trouble.
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