Last.fm Radio Station? Say it ain't so!

I'm a huge fan of last.fm and the work they do, but I've always been a little curious as to their role with CBS. Apparently, CBS has decided to use the online radio station for something that it is not: a terrestrial, non-personalized radio station. While it might be "neat" to use this tool to see what's popular among the specific demographic of the online station, by no means is this a great tool for recommendation - which is at the heart and core of last.fm's mission. What would such a station play anyway? Depends a lot on the type of "chart" they are using, but suffice it to stay, most plays will fairly bland in terms of their novelty factor. For example, let's look at the current Top Ten artists: (Note: This was written around September 8th and published later, so the current artists are different, but concepts are the same).

1) Radiohead
2) Beatles
3) Coldplay
4) Muse
5) Michael Jackson
6) The Killers
7) Metallica
8) Kings of Leon
9) Red Hot Chili Peppers
10) Artic Monkeys

Besides the obvious British bias, we can see that the most common artists are not exactly "strange." They are all (at least) decent, respected bands. Some have been around a while (Radiohead, Coldplay, Metallica, Red Hot Chili Peppers) and some are staples of any music list (Beatles, Michael Jackson). However, I wouldn't exactly say that these bands are strange to radio play (yes, to some degree, Kings of Leon and Artic Monkeys are not as common, but I would hardly say that they get almost no radio play, at least in the US). (As an update, on today, September 18th, the Beatles passed Radiohead, which came out September 9th. While this does show the power of Last.fm's "buzz meter," it is hardly unforseen. Further, this is an example of already popular, known bands simply trading places.)

Also, these two bands are really in the list due to recent releases, as evident from the current Top 10 tracks:

1) Kings of Leon - "Sex on Fire"
2) Kings of Leon - "Use Somebody"
3) MGMT - "Kids"
4) Arctic Monkeys - "Crying Lightning"
5) Coldplay - "Viva La Vida"
6) Lady GaGa - "Poker Face"
7) Muse - "Supermassive Black Hole"
8) MGMT - "Time to Pretend"
9) Black Eyed Peas - "I Gotta Feeling"
10) MGMT - "Electric Feel"

Yeah, these are all very rare indeed. Hint: If the artist is being asked to play at the MTV Music awards, then it is a safe bet that the artist is not a rare find. What if I contiue farther? Well, #14 is "Wonderwall" by Oasis and thank God because I haven't heard that about a bajillion times.

About the only good list would be the "Hyped List," but this is more than likely just following new releases. Truth is that a station that would be that eclectic probably won't fair well since users would be hearing a high degree of music they don't like (i.e., people probably will not like bouncing from niche to niche).

The truth is that this violates the very nature of last.fm - personalized music discovery. Will the radio station fail? No, of course not. It will actually be interesting to see how well the record companies try to follow the Wisdom of the Crowds. This is, after all, capitalism. It was always believed that record companies tried to make people like certain bands, but in truth, the record companies just knew what most people either liked or, at least, could listen to without running from the room screaming. Truth be told, Nickelback and Creed suck, but most people can listen to them because it isn't so awful that I can't either tune it out or stop myself from sticking pencils in my ear . It's just boring rock template music. People didn't buy millions of Spice Girls albums because they had a bunch of money in their pocket, found themselves in a record store, and didn't know what else to buy. They bought it because they wanted to (and you know who you are and should be ashamed of yourself - if my sister had a webpage, I'd link to it here).

I fear this radio station will just be yet another radio stations which focuses on the rather narrow "head" of the long tail and never really gets into the niche markets. The reason? Radio execs focus on what's popular and what will be popular. They are still successful in this, but what they lack is the ability to tailor distribution channels to individual needs and wants. It is not the price of songs that is destroying the music business. If that were true, then as online marketers slashed prices, sales would increase. But this hasn't happened because, despite what Napster fans would have you believe, it was never about prices, but about finding the music that you, and only you, wanted. This is the market that sites like Last.fm are designed to infiltrate - but a radio station broadcast to millions cannot capture this ability. On the other hand, one can hope that I will be pleasantly surprised.

Terry McBride interviews with Paste

Phew! It's been a while! Guess I've been busy getting a MIREX submission for chord detection completed. Anyway, news of the day: recently Terry McBride sat down with Paste Magazine for a quick "Where are we going?" interview. It's a very quick, but good view of how the music industry is finally dealing with their new role.

Digital Music Leads the Way

Total music sales grew 10% this year, which is a positive trend the music industry has not seen in a long time.  More interesting is that digital sales led the way, with a 27% increase in digital track sold and a 32% increase in digital album sales.  However, the number of physical albums sold is down 14%, including an 8.6% decrease in physical albums sold by e-commerce sites.  I'm sure that many will point to the irony of this being revealed around the same time the RIAA announced it was going to stop sueing their constumers for digital file sharing.  Before anyone does this, I will disagree since the RIAA was never against digital downloads, but illegal digital downloads since they receive no profit.

Rather, I want to comment on the idea that people still prefer albums over singles.  While it's true that album sales are still growing faster than digital tracks, it would be wrong to conclude that people still prefer albums.  All that we can say is that it is plausible.  However, some necessary controls need to be accounted for before this conclusion can be drawn.  For example, the success of AC/DC's Black Ice suffers from the same problem as In Rainbows by Radiohead.  Both are by very successful bands and would do well regardless of format and distribution.  That's like drowning a salad in ranch dressing and claiming you are being health-conscious since you are having a lot of veggies.  One trumps the other.

Second, it is not really fair to compare albums to a group of singles, since their cost structure is different.  Most online retailers charge a standard cost to a single track (e.g., $0.99) and then a standard cost to an album (e.g., $9.99).  The problem is that the album cost is regardless of the number of tracks.  This changes the worth of an individual track.  For example, say there are 15 songs on the album and I really like 7 songs.  The real cost of the remaining songs is not eight dollars, but $3.  While I would never buy one of these songs for $0.99, they might be worth $0.38.  This is a variable that needs to be accounted for.

Third, a more important point is that iPod is the place where music dies since 64% of songs are never played.  It would be unwise of the music industry to ignore this problem, since they need satisified customers to continue buying music.  Two possible ways to increase the "playrate" is through a new pricing strucutre and recommendation technology.  The former can be solved by bundle rates.  As I mentioned above, one possible reason for the continued success of digital albums sales is the different pricing structure of an album vs. a  set of singles.  This leads to a lot of songs being bought, but never really played.  By allowing users to mix and match to make their own "album bundle" could greatly increase customer satisification.  For example, 1 song for $0.99, 10 songs for $8.99, 15 songs for $10.99, etc.  There would be no requirements on which songs are selected in the bundle.  Related is the need to improve and implement recommendation technology.  Often ignored in economic analysis is the cost of time spent on the consumer.  Searching for music is a laborious task without recommendation and discovery tools.  Even iTunes only recently launched Genius.

In conclusion, the claim from artists (especially) that people still prefer albums is still undecided.  There is reason to believe this is plausible, but there are still some questions that need to be addressed.

Old Copyright Laws Hurt Research

Note: Thanks to my brother, Josh, for his comments.  Josh is an IP lawyer in Chicago, IL.

Recently, a question was phrased on a research mailing list, that more or less went as follows: the researcher was conducting a listening experiment and there was a potential that the subjects could potentially find and keep the 15-second excerpts for personal use.  The author was worried that this constituted a copyright violation.  I pointed out that more than likely this falls under fair use.  However, reading this gives one clear impression: the law itself is rather meaningless.  First, the law only stipulates what needs to be considered in evaluating fair use, without giving guidelines or specifics.  The webpage states "There is no specific number of words, lines, or notes that may safely be taken without permission," and that it is best to obtain permission from the copyright holder.  Further, the precedent given only gives a partial list of examples that was relevant in 1961.

These points are key to researchers in information retrieval (and in particular, music information retrieval) because these laws were based on the 1960's technology.  Simply put, exchanging songs, text, images, etc., was a rather involved task.  Today, the exchange and storage can be conducted on a massive scale, unforeseen by the lawmakers fifty years ago.  With this increased capacity for storage, researchers can now test large-scale IR algorithms and the need for a (relatively) free, large scale database is needed.  However, in the case of music, such large scale databases are impossible to find or have severe restrictions on them.  Every year, I see experiment after experiment of promising algorithms, but results must be taken only so far because of the size and scope of the testing database.  Even though some schools have access to a large library archive of recordings, researchers at other institutions are unable to duplicate their results because the data is not freely available.

Some researchers have found "loopholes" that allow them to share features extracted from audio, which cannot be used to recreate the audio (e.g., Mel-cepstral coefficients).  This is still not a viable solution because no-one can a priori determine the best features for all IR experiments and experimentation with new features is impossible.  Also, potentially, a set of features, which in combination may be reversible could lead to the best results, but this is impossible to test if only a limited set of features is ever distributed.

A very interesting solution comes in the form of MIREX, where a TREC-like evaluation is conducted by having researchers send in algorithms to various competitions.  However, there are a few drawbacks.  First, it is an enormous burden on the sponsoring institution, IMERSIL at The University of Illinois.  The livelihood is also completely depended on the program's funding, which is fine for the next few years, but the long-term stability is not guaranteed.  Second, the evaluation is carried out once a year, but there was talk of extending this to a rolling model.  A third problem is that tasks are largely fixed and a new task is only considered if it has broad approval.  New and interesting tasks are still subject to small, private databases before their inclusion in the task.

I applaud those at IMERSIL for coming up with the proposed solution and also those that supply databases in some form or another, but these are patches to the main problem, which, as I have stated, is that copyright regulations are severely out-of-date.  Simply put, when today's regulations were implemented, no one imagined the scalablity of today's information age.  Regulations are not only needed for the public sector to address today's file-sharing "problem," but also, better regulations are needed for today's researchers.

The problem ultimately stems from the current practice of common law.  Simply put, our current laws are written as loose guidelines and the specifics are left open to the courts.  Despite what you learned in history class, our laws are not actually written by legislatures, but rather by those on the bench.  Look at The Sherman Act: a single sentence determines when the law is applicable; however, courts have expanded and contracted this law as they see fit.  Instead of a coherent, well-structured law that anyone can follow, one needs a swarm of lawyers to get through any issue.  Worse, many people are completely unaware that they may be breaking copyright law.  Many researchers wrongly assume that if they use less than 30 seconds, then they are legally safe, but this is untrue.  It is purely dependent on whether the recording industry chooses to go after you and how good your defense team is.

So what would a good solution look like?  I have thought of one that is actually rather easy and is found in other research fields.  Handling of nuclear, biological, and chemical materials contains a strict set of guidelines for researchers to follow in obtaining, handling, and destroying potentially dangerous chemicals.  I'm actually a little surprised that a similar structure has not been suggested for the use of copyright materials.  Such guidelines could allow researchers access to large amounts of complete, unaltered data (i.e., full songs, raw audio), while still ensuring the rights of the copyright holders.

I can already address the objection that will be raised by the copyright holders: "But very few researchers will want to take home nuclear, biological, and chemical materials."  This is just untrue.  Many research labs conduct studies on illegal drugs, such as marijuana.  Are you telling me that no researcher would want to take home a little stash?  Again, strict guidelines are in place to ensure that researchers use these illegal substances in an ethical and legal manner while also ensuring that necessary research can be conducted (http://www.safeaccessnow.org/article.php?id=5183).  This is definitely possible in terms of music, text, and other multi-media.

Noel Gallagher Could Run For Office

Only a politician could say something absolute like Oasis will never give away a record like Radiohead did and then do something that's almost like he said he wouldn't do.  But Noel Gallagher did that since Oasis will now stream their new album for free.  True, they aren't giving it away, but it's at least 80% hypocrisy.  I can understand Noel's point: a band needs to be paid.  But maybe ownership of music is not the way to go.  Certainly, there are other ways to raise captial.  Selling music to sites that distribute it for free and then show advertisements is one way.  Encouraging ticket sales is another.  For a 90's alternative band, Oasis sure is stuck... in the 90s.

Anyway, off to see the Raconteurs.

YouTube and New Music: Not a Solution

I did not blog too much after the first day at ISMIR because Paul Lamere was doing a very good job, so you can check out his details here.  However, there was one article I saw on CNN during the conference on YouTube being the next showcase for new music.  Personally, I hope not.  True, millions of people use the site daily and it is a great resource in trying to find music if you know exactly what you are looking for.  However, try using YouTube to discover new music, especially if you are also discovering new bands.  Currently, you'll have to enter in the artist name or song title to find anything.  But what if I want to find something that's like something else, but that I've never heard before?

The difference between the two concepts is ultimately the difference between retrieval, recommendation, and discovery.  The old "Google search bar" paradigm is great for retrieving something if I have a general idea of what I'd like.  However, it's still very object based.  By this, I mean that I need to know the thing I am looking for.  In recommendation, the focus is on the idea of what I might like.  For example, collaborative filtering notices that I've bought Carl Sagin's A Demon-Haunted World and will recommend James Randi's Flim-Flam! since people that buy Sagin's book also buy Randi's.  Currently, YouTube does have both, but their discovery technology is a lacking.  A great quick look at the difference between discovery and recommendation can be gained here, but ultimately discovery is learning why I like something, which is actually much harder to do.  What is it that I like Sagan's book?  Is it because he's a great science writer?  Is it his research?  Is it his involvement in the skeptical movement?  The three have dramatically different answers.  If it's writing,  then I'll probably want Dawkin's book on scientific writing.  If it's his research, then I'll probably want another book by Sagan about astronomy.  If it's the skeptical movement, then Randi's just one of many great selections.

Currently, YouTube does not really support discovery and would probably need to be redesigned to get it right.  I've literally listened to hundreds of artists on YouTube since I use it to play guitar.  However, there is no recommendations for new music based on what I've listened to in the past.  If I want something, I've got to first find an artist I know, and then continue to click "related" videos until I finally find something cool.  The process is long and there is a good chance that I'll get stuck in a cycle or worse, get way off target.  For the artist, this means that generating new listeners will be difficult and still have to come by word-of-mouth rather than automatic recommendation.

Where's the RIAA on this one?

The earliest form of a computer playing music is discovered. One wonders when the RIAA will sue...

If you can't beat them, join them

In an attempt to be the EU of music, Merlin, tries to "to turn indie bands and labels into a loose, decentralized version of the major label." Recently, they are trying to prove their worth in a deal with online sites much like what major labels have. Of course there are two issues at play. The first is the continual instance of the major labels (and multimedia distributers in general) that everyone is out to get them and that they carry no fault. It amazes me how unaware the industry is about the fact that hits have fallen faster than the industry as a whole. The bottom line is that controlling the distribution channels ultimately chokes competition and ruins quality. Call me a skeptic, but I find it hard to believe the deal between MySpace and the major labels is anything but a plot to ration music on the internet. Are we headed for Radio 2.0?

The second issue is whether Merlin actually stays true to its message. As these major labels try ration music on the internet, will Merlin not be pulled by the appeal of control and power? Sure, there is a ton of revenue in The Long Tail, but it also involves a lot of work. What is the revenue generated from investment in a new band? As a band gets bigger, it's costs go up, but the rate of return is higher (and probably, more secure - when will U2 or Coldplay not sell out?). Also, you need fewer bands to make the equivalent revenue. Things are even more appealing if you can control the distribution channels. Will Merlin be able to pass this up and stay not-for-profit? Probably, but more likely, Merlin's Indie bands will jump ship if they start becoming a hit, ensuring Merlin will not eat up "too much" of the market.

So we are left with the status quo. A new distribution channel will open, independent bands will flock to it to get their message out, the record labels will sue, but eventually sign a deal which chokes competition, and repeat.

A how to for myspace bands

Wired has a wiki page with a "how to" for promoting your band on myspace. I am a facebook guy, but still, pretty cool reference. Although, there are some rather obvious tips... like how attractive people are more photogenic.

A rare agreement

For once I agree with the record labels. Capitalism is cool.

Sounds familiar

The Leading Question and Music Ally have teamed up to state the five ways the music industry can save its sorry a$$. Of course, this is just a repeat from what other have said (recycled isn't just left for RSS feeds). For instance:

1) Gerd Leonhard already stated the need to bundle music into other products.

3) Kurtis Jacobson already stated that freeing music will lead to increased revenues.

4) and 5) David Jennings stated in his book, that charts are vastly out-dated because they "lost their 'water cooler' effect". Also, half his book is on the need for more power to be given to Savants.

Even point 2) could be seen as a part of the solution proposed by David Weinberger. Judging from the speed that companies and the government seem to work, one wonders if its a good idea to listen to the consumer.

Piracy hurts public health?

It seems I can always count on California to overreact and come to some illogical conclusions. While music and video piracy is still a problem for the major record labels, I find it hard to believe that there is any detriment to public health. I have never heard of anyone being physically or even emotionally hurt by such a crime. There has never been anyone dragged to the emergency room due to an illegal download. In fact, unless you are traveling around the coastal waters of Somalia and other parts of the Indian Ocean, I would have to say your chances of being hurt by anyone engaged in piracy is minimal. I'm starting to wonder if those running the Los Angeles government have confused The Pirates of the Caribbean with the nightly news. They even go to say the welfare of the country's citizens are at stake. I know the RIAA believes that dead people and pre-teens are a horrible aggitators and need to be stopped, I have never been in any immediate threat because on of my neighbors may have obtained the newest Sun Kil Moon album illegally. This whole statement screams of such ridiculous overstatements that it should trigger one's skeptic sense.