What a brilliant antidote to the current highly lame trend of attempted personalised music selection software (Pandora,etc). This Brian Whitman fellow has got it right (even though he’s admittedly part of the problem, ha!). These services are only going to point you in the direction of some major label hackery you’d never notice on your own, anyways. Nothing will ever beat word of mouth and the recommendations of friends and relatives with excellent taste. Let the deletions begin !

I have a strong aversion to music recommenders and music similarity services. I especially deal with a lot of cognitive dissonance as the company I co-founded makes a lot of $$$$$ (that is 5 dollar signs) selling ordered lists of artists to multinational music streaming conglomerates.
Nonetheless, we recently completed our first live recommender system (to be announced near the Boston Music Hack day in October) and to perhaps get myself more comfortable with a future in which children will no longer ask their cooler older dope-smoking brothers what to listen to in lieu of some HTML table in a UL, I decided to really sign up wholesale to this movement. If we rely on these computer programs to learn about music, well we might as well rely on them to fix the sins of our past and delete the crap we are obviously not meant to listen to anymore.
“Future of Music (2010)” is a Mac OS X app that scans your iTunes library and computes the music you are not supposed to listen to anymore based on your preferences. It then helpfully deletes it from iTunes and your hard drive. Skips the recycle bin. Just like other recommender systems, it uses a lot of fancy math (and data from Echo Nest and last.fm) that really doesn’t matter in the end. Just click the button and let it take care of your life. I want it to also delete scrobbles and spotify playlists that feature the artists. Maybe it should read your email too and tell you who you shouldn’t talk to anymore, i could use that

 
Future of Music (Music Hack Day)
 
Thanks Kurt Ralske!

Wow. The day I let a piece of software determine for me which music I should (or should not) listen to is the day I give up on music all together. Or just follow Top 40/Pitchfork/whatever.

Is ‘taste’ or personal preference too complex? Or do people simply have too many options?

These personalized internet radio stations remind of at times of the old-time record stores, where a (probably commissioned) sales person would actually recommend stuff to you based on what they thought you’d like. I remember in my teenage punk-rock dirtbag phase continually having some kind of crap pushed at me. <i>“Here. This is a new hot band from England. They’re called Sigue Sigue Spuntnik. You’ll love ‘em”.</i> I guess I sorta deserved it.

I have to say, though, that I’ve had pretty good luck with tweaking Pandora to serve up stuff that’s pretty close (although it’s annoying in that I can’t make a Prog list without it slipping in Led Zeppelin - but again, I guess I deserve it).
I’ve also found that with Grooveshark, it’s impossible to listen to Wall of Voodoo without Oingo Boingo popping up.

Custom music apps never work for me. My tastes vary so significantly that the algorithms are rendered useless. I’m not sure if that’s good or bad, but it keeps me away from the music et al personalization software.

Kurt Ralske, Ultra Vivid Scene? Cool!

@melvillain:  I totally agree.

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Its really been a very informative article indeed. Thanks for sharing such valuable stuff with us.

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