Do we really need another music app? How many of us are (or planning to) use Twitter for music discovery? For the average consumer, Spotify has just about everything for anyone. For the avid listener, there are hundreds of quality music blogs dedicated every niche out there. It seems like Twitter decided they wanted a slice of the pie- I fail to see how this could possibly fit into my use case for Twitter (if it's even part of the core product at all). That being said, I hope they prove me wrong.
There is no software in the world that can curate music like that based on predictive modeling that I've seen.
I've been trying to make one for years that can span decades, nations, and genres like that.
I've found that if I aggregate a selective circle of people than I can get there. But that's the only way I've found so far.
Ok, USE CASE 2.
What's Justin Bieber or Keith Richards currently listening to? What about a talent scout at BMI? What if you could follow and tap into those people's personal playlists like twitter allows you to tap into what's on their plates for dinner and other personal things?
And I mean right now. Shania Twain hits play and it sends that to the server. Thousands of users world-wide tapping into her personal radio station immediately get a non-time-shifted instant feedback.
I think it would be compelling and addictive.
It's the classic celeb allure that's been twitter's mainstream pot of gold.
Pandora is the best of a bad lot. They have an interesting approach, but any lengthy listen will reveal a lot of repetition; not because there's a tiny universe of music to recommend, but rather because they can't afford to troll the long tail (downloading stuff from Bandcamp, for instance). What works for Pandora is their curation, and the marginal cost of increasing inputs is more than they are willing to spend.
The last record I bought (a single by The Greys) I listened to on recommendation of a coworker, who's in a band that I like, who had played with some people who are playing a show with The Greys. I also like going to a local record store (Soundscapes) and just buying what the people who work there recommend. Nobody is currently capturing these signals; Facebook is obviously the one company that has access to perhaps a sufficiency of this data, but music recommendations are seemingly pretty small beer in the Zuckerbergian scheme of things.
The lack of a decent music (or film/TV) recommendation system looks a lot like a business opportunity, but I think that it's fundamentally not a business. Recommendations can drive business to a retail operation, but how do you sell recommendations qua recommendations?
I am not sure if I would say algorithmic music discovery have failed but yes, I would pick curation over algorithms any day. It just gives me more context.
>I fail to see how this could possibly fit into my use case for Twitter
obviously no product is going to fit everybody's use case. but if you look at the number of links to music videos on youtube that are passed around every day, it's pretty clear that music on twitter fits a lot of people's use case.
I use Spotify as my primary music listening service and their music discovery is terrible. I'll gladly listen to Spotify through Twitter if it means better charts of new music, popular music, etc.
Last time I checked, Pandora's catalog was far too limited to be valuable to me for discovery. It was easy to come up with a half a dozen artists I like that Pandora had no clue about.
To me the word "discovery" means finding unknown works, not simply another way to listen to an artist who is already well established.
Pandora for discovery is a nonstarter, at least for me.
My dream wish is if someone could make a Pandora-like app ( both of in terms of functionality and quality) built on top of Spotify. I know spotify offers some API but don't know if this would be possible.
IIRC Pandora has a catalog size of about 1 million vs ~20 million for Spotify and yet they have been able to do a superb job in song recommendations. I find Spotify radio to be pretty terrible at this.
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