Sun gets smart about music recommendation

I grew up on "American Bandstand," and I used to cringe when it came to the Rate a Record segment, because I knew that the kids were going to give the record a totally meaningless numerical rating and when Dick Clark asked why they gave it an 87 or whatever it was, they would invariably say, "It has a good beat and I can dance to it."

Online music recommendation systems built into iTunes and Amazon are more sophisticated than this, giving you the benefit of the musical judgement of others who are in some sense like you, but ultimately they amount to the same thing: the essentially unexplained preferences of strangers.

Sun Microsystems has a different idea with its project Seach Inside the Music. It uses machine learning to actually analyze aspects of the music you like. Sun plans to release the technology as open source, maybe within the next six months.

Posted by Mike Swaine at 05:33 PM  Permalink