mathoda.com

As the amount of content on the internet keeps increasing, the ability of companies to recommend you the right content becomes more important. The Pandora recommendation system uses an interesting approach. Human raters judge key components of songs (melody, etc.) to recommend a custom made radio station to you based upon your specifying a favorite musical artist.

As they say:

Together we set out to capture the essence of music at the most fundamental level. We ended up assembling literally hundreds of musical attributes or “genes” into a very large Music Genome. Taken together these genes capture the unique and magical musical identity of a song - everything from melody, harmony and rhythm, to instrumentation, orchestration, arrangement, lyrics, and of course the rich world of singing and vocal harmony. It’s not about what a band looks like, or what genre they supposedly belong to, or about who buys their records - it’s about what each individual song sounds like.

Over the past 5 years, we’ve carefully listened to the songs of over 10,000 different artists - ranging from popular to obscure - and analyzed the musical qualities of each song one attribute at a time. This work continues each and every day as we endeavor to include all the great new stuff coming out of studios, clubs and garages around the world.

Using expert humans to rate musical content, like Pandora does, reminds me of the original Yahoo website idea, which used human beings to categorize content into a hierarchical structure.

This entry has been filed under business, tech.