Music Recommendation and Discovery: The Long Tail, Long Fail, and Long Play in the Digital Music Space

by Òscar Celma

In the last 15 years we have seen a major transformation in the world of music. - sicians use inexpensive personal computers instead of expensive recording studios to record, mix and engineer music. Musicians use the Internet to distribute their - sic for free instead of spending large amounts of money creating CDs, hiring trucks and shipping them to hundreds of record stores. As the cost to create and distribute recorded music has dropped, the amount of available music has grown dramatically. Twenty years ago a typical record store would have music by less than ten thousand artists, while today online music stores have music catalogs by nearly a million artists. While the amount of new music has grown, some of the traditional ways of ?nding music have diminished. Thirty years ago, the local radio DJ was a music tastemaker, ?nding new and interesting music for the local radio audience. Now - dio shows are programmed by large corporations that create playlists drawn from a limited pool of tracks. Similarly, record stores have been replaced by big box reta- ers that have ever-shrinking music departments. In the past, you could always ask the owner of the record store for music recommendations. You would learn what was new, what was good and what was selling. Now, however, you can no longer expect that the teenager behind the cash register will be an expert in new music, or even be someone who listens to music at all.

Genres: Music

210 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2010

Reviews

[Ocelma]

One of the most boring books I've ever read...
I didn't get anything. There's too many weird formulas, and all the Long Tail blurb. Is there anyone that still thinks there's money in the long tail...for Music?!

[Neal]

Probably the best book about music recommendation that I have yet to read. The author takes you on a journey to the Mordor of music recommendation and throws you into a volcano of algorithms by the long tail.

Best read with a quiet glass of wine and some rock music blasting.

[Tara Brabazon]

This is a surprising book. I expected a discussion of digital music. I gained that knowledge, but it is much more specialist. This book demonstrates mechanisms to manage 'the long tail' as producers and consumers. Particularly, there is a discussion of how to develop strategies - and algorithms - to automate the recommendation process.

The goal is to create strategies to improve musical retrieval while acknowledging - in some form - personalization. The key is to manage familiarity, novelty and relevance. This management can be enacted through implicit or explicit feedback by consumers.

The complexity of configuring filtering methods for what Celma described as the "playlist generation" is well revealed through this book. This book is a pleasant surprise and offers insight into an array of digital and digitized industries.