Jul 23 2008
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Jul 18 2008
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...and another thing
I thought that after the release of the alpha version of the core search engine and facebook app I would at least be able to take a short break. No dice. It turns out that improving the fb app is an all consuming task. I released what was almost a full rewrite of the app (which is admittedly still quite simple) this past monday. Of course, that only provided the impetus for much more good feedback so major features for managing your artist collection, like tag filters and customizable “playlists”, are now priority number one in progress.
I’ll also be adding artist photos, probably next week, as requested by the fb app “usability advisory council” (you know who you are).
I’m tired….
Jul 02 2008
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The Next Level: Musedot 0.5
I am music.
I am rock and roll.
I am a descendant of a long, long line of musicians. That ancestral line stretches back hundreds of years and now, I hope, projects forward into modernity. Sound self-congratulatory enough? I’m in a bit of a self-congratulatory mood, despite my near exhaustion.
It’s out! The alpha version of musedot is now online and I’m actually feeling more relieved than anything. It was a tremendous amount of hard work (thus my long absence from this blog), more than I expected, but the results also exceeded my expectations- at least so far. For example, I just thought of and implemented the video feature last week, and it’s actually useful.
My self-congratulatory statements aside, what musedot is really all about is empowering musicians and fans through this newfangled web 2.0 technology. Empowering all of us to connect in a simple, but powerful, way. I’m hoping that this release is a critical step forward in what will be a very long and ultimately successful journey.
Here goes nothing.
Mar 24 2008
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Much Better!
I just switched this blog to tumblr today and am liking it much better than the old and cranky live journal system. This is much simpler and intuitive, and has clearly superior multi-media options.
Dec 04 2007
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Musedot 0.1
I just released the very first publicly available version of the musedot.com search/exploration two days ago. This represents months of work, mainly by yours truly, but with very significant and appreciated contributions by young Daniel Chan. I’m most proud that we actually managed to build a search engine literally from scratch, after much puzzling through the research I conducted on the subject. Of course, the technology itself is super new. Like I said, release 0.1. I’m well aware that the site is still not all that useful, at least not compared to what I think it needs to be in order to win over casual users. There’s such a long road to go.The question now is what next? Of course, Musedot Free Radio is still in the works, if I can find the right developer that is, and it will be another critical piece of the puzzle. However, things are fast approaching the point where many more resources are necessary to move forward. We’ll see what happens.
Aug 29 2007
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The Theoretical Foundation of Musedot
The consumption of music is a highly personal and subjective activity that has not and cannot be adequately served by algorithmic approaches based on subjective musical taxonomic systems (Pandora), listening habit aggregation and analysis (last.fm), rudimentary social-network sharing (MySpace), or purchase histories (Amazon.com and others). In my opinion, all these approaches are fundamentally flawed and offer little true utility. They poorly mimic how people seek and discover (as opposed to being marketed to by traditional means) music in the “real” world, and also do little to augment these natural behaviors. The fundamental flaws with these approaches are that they are highly impersonal and reinforce pre-internet mass marketing techniques. They are undermined primarily by flaws I call popularity amplification and similarity paradox.
Recommendation technologies such as those offered by amazon.com suffer acutely from the flaw of popularity amplification. It is certainly possible for amazon.com to make recommendations by matching a user’s purchase history with that of other customers. This works to a reasonable degree because the preferences of music listeners do correlate in taste cliques (Liu & Maes, 2005). However one can easily foresee problems with this algorithmic approach when presented with scarce purchase metrics upon which to base the recommendations. This will obviously happen without fail in the case of debut or obscure artists. Thus the system ends up weighted towards already “popular” artists with substantial catalogs and sales, regardless of the true value of a specific artist to a specific user.
Last.fm is a leading, but by no means exclusive, example of the similarity paradox The technology underlying this service is based on the theory that users are more likely to be interested in music that is “similar” to another artist that the user specifies either directly or through the tracking of listening habits. Other than in broad genre-level taxonomies (indie pop, would be an example of such a classification), what constitutes “similar” in music cannot be reduced to objective criteria, yet much effort has been made in creating systems for this purpose, or in the case of last.fm creating a listening habit aggregation system that ferrets out these similarities.
The similarity based system posits that if a listener likes band A, and band B is “similar” to band A, the listener is more likely to like band B as well. However, once one moves beyond broad genre-classifications, any criteria used to establish similarity between artists is inherently subjective, meaning algorithmically irreducible. The application of this approach produces a collection of artists functionally equivalent, and/or already quite well known to the user, or, most critically, perceived as subjectively dissimilar by the user. In other words, much more often than not, a list of “similar” artists is of absolutely no value to the user.
The bottom line is that neither “popularity”, as defined and shaped by the music industry, nor “similarity” has any practical predictive value for any individual listener. They are impersonal criteria, and their derivative technologies merely enhance pre-internet market aggregation techniques and theories. It is my contention that it is absolutely impossible for any such algorithmic approach to predict, with any useful percentage of utility, what music a listener will actually like- at least not with any technology available today or in the foreseeable future. The lack of rapid organic growth among the current crop of music utilities I’ve mentioned is itself sufficient evidence of this truth.
The Solution: Social Data Mining
One of the most important, and least predicted, developments in Internet technology over the last few years has been the rise of social networks such as MySpace and Facebook. These online “communities” have empowered users to map and augment the social relationships of the real world, and have brought innovations in basic human activities like communicating and social organizing. It is through these sites that relationships between people are for the first time being modeled in useful and easily accessible ways. These, and other related technologies, are often referred to as Web 2.0, or Internet technologies focused on improving the social mechanisms of communities such as collaboration and sharing.
The advent of these social networks is absolutely critical to the challenge of creating music discovery technology because their value lies in the relationships that are represented, and these relationships map to and shape preferences in all consumable media. For the first time in history, we now have a wealth of data sourced from the human relationships that enable the production and support the consumption of music in particular. And this data is growing in quality and quantity at a staggering rate. Therefore, I propose that the creative application of data analysis techniques on these new data sets, or social data mining (Liu & Maes, 2005), will result in innovative internet applications that will provide users with truly valuable personalized tools, driven by the same underlying social networks that they create and rely on in the real world, and which will succeed in systematically exposing them to music they care about.
References
Hugo Liu and Pattie Maes: 2005, InterestMap: Harvesting Social Network Profiles for Recommendations. Workshop: Beyond Personalization (San Diego 2005). http://ambient.media.mit.edu/assets/_pubs/BP2005-hugo-interestmap.pdf
Jun 25 2007
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Hey, I Already Said That!
Here’s an interesting article from Slate that is in agreement with my analysis (previous post) that Facebook has a good chance of crushing MySpace http://www.slate.com/id/2168872
Jun 20 2007
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Musedot and the Future
The following is back story information about Musedot that DeAngela requested from me and which I thought might be good to share with the rest of the family.
Musedot Mission: To use Internet technology to help you find music that you would like if only you knew about it.
Is Musedot a Social Music Network?: “Social Music Network” is an interesting concept and one put forth by DeAngela, however it’s not quite an accurate description of Musedot. Musedot is a music discovery tool (albeit a very crude one), and over time will develop into a suite of much more sophisticated and complimentary tools, all focused on connecting users to music they don’t know about as the primary goal, and as a secondary goal providing resources and functionality to aid in integrating this music into their lives. I’m being intentionally ambiguous about the secondary goal because I don’t want to give away too much strategy at this point. Recently, I’ve become especially fond of the Google model- which I didn’t know that much about or think about when conducting the research and development for the Musedot project. Now that I’ve done some homework on the history of Google, it is apparent there are some interesting similarities between the two stories. I’m not in any way comparing myself to the founders of Google, they’re brilliant computer science guys and I’m definitely not that. However, the similarities in the genesis of these two tools is worth noting, at least to my mind, and I feel some of the Google strategies are worth emulating.(*)
At any rate, Google started as a search engine and has continuously created other tools that tend to be synergistic with the core search utility- Google Maps, Gmail, Google News, etc. The plan is for Musedot to develop in a similar fashion. Musedot will always have some social networking aspects, such as the ability to share a recommendation in some form, but I don’t envision it ever being a full-blown social networking site along the lines of myspace or facebook. Let them, or their future replacements, do that.
Revolution: Frank’s Agenda?: This is where some of the aspects of my personal goals seem to be easily confused with my analysis of the music industry and the impact Internet technology will have on this industry going forward. Internet technology is both causing and facilitating revolutionary changes in the music business and has been doing so for years. This has absolutely nothing to do with me, other than the fact that I made some pretty accurate predictions about how things would play out and am continuing to make predictions. Primarily because of the advent of compressed file formats like mp3 and the rise of peer-to-peer networks like the original Napster, the music distribution eco-system has been experiencing some major upheaval and re-organization (I like the term creative destruction myself, which was coined by my favorite economist, Josef Schumpeter). If you don’t want to take my word for it, just ask the RIAA.
The transformations in music distribution that we’ve seen thus far are a prelude to what we’ll see in other aspects of the music business once the technology is able to displace people/organizations/business models in the same way the peer-to-peer/mp3 and related technology displaced (and continues to displace) the people/organizations/business models associated with getting CDs manufactured and into the hands of customers. Think Sun distributors, Tower Records, your former local record store owner, etc. I’m simply asserting that Internet technology will have the same revolutionary affects on how we not only physically *acquire* the music we listen to, but how we found out about it in the first place. That’s it. It seems like a rather safe prediction from my perspective and I’m willing to stake my future on it.
The prediction itself is even less radical if you consider that this is already happening to a small degree. Sites like lastfm.com, pandora.com, and others all share commons goals in terms of exposing users to music. The difference lies in the approaches, and I believe that will eventually make all the difference.
Revolution: How does Frank see them tied together? Whenever you have revolution that generates opportunity. In fact, that’s really what a revolution is- an opportunity generating mechanism for people who didn’t have any or at least not the kind they wanted. As I’ve stated, the revolution has already started, I just want to lead them to where it is they want to go. This will be done by organizing a family business developed to carry out the mission. Let’s call this entity Musedot Inc. to keep things simple. The fact is there is no way in hell I can do anything significant on my own, so the building of the family business is critical.
The overarching ideal of Internet technology disrupting and creatively destroying the marketing and advertising aspects of the music business is what I previously referred to as the Movement, but I was basically using the organization I’m trying to build around Musedot interchangeably with this phenomenon as a whole. In my mind they are synonymous, but aside from my personal goals the Movement is a term meant to evoke a broad zeitgeist, not a specific person, organization or technology. Hopefully, Musedot will be one of many organizations involved in leading the Movement, so a person can actively participate simply by joining or collaborating with Musedot Inc. The things that we’ll try to accomplish will be revolutionary just by their very nature, because of the potential impact on established companies, behaviors, business models, etc. However, the only thing people in Musedot Inc. will really need to stay focused on is the mission.
What Makes it Different from MySpace?: MySpace is a social networking site and Musedot is a music discovery tool. The goals are different although there is some overlap of course, and there is some overlap in the means as well. For instance both MySpace and Musedot might enable you to share some sort of information with people you consider your “friends”. Lots of other sites do that as well, but that certainly doesn’t make them the equivalent of MySpace.
What is the Future sans MySpace?: Musedot will be resource neutral, meaning it might aggregate information from a number of sources and those sources may include MySpace and they might not.
Legal Ramifications?: No more than any other Web information aggregation/analysis technology, like your garden variety search engine.
Frank Note: I think that just as the term “search engine” entered the lexicon, some kind of term to describe the category of applications like Musedot will have to enter the lexicon as well. I generally use “music discovery tool” because that makes sense to me, but it’s entirely possible that will not prove to be popular with the masses.
May 28 2007
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AOL Redux:Or Why MySpace is a Piece of Crap
First, a bit of history. I’ve been an entrepreneur in Interweb-related businesses since around 1995. Unlike many of you fresh faced kids, I can remember a once mighty colossus of a business that was called America Online at the time. You may be surprised to know that at one point way back in the early days of this whole phenomenon, America Online was the undisputed monster and dominator of the Interweb business. Then what happened, you ask? America Online was sold to TimeWarner (a scion of the pre-Interweb media biz) for an astronomical sum, changed it’s name to AOL somewhere in there, and the new AOL proceeded to sink like your moms in a big ol’ comfy chair and almost took ol’ TimeWarner down with it. A few people got filthy richer (Steve Case!) and a lot of shareholders lost their shirts. And their pants and socks too.
Fast-forward to 2005. MySpace.com, the undisputed monster and dominator of the new social networking breakfast club is sold to News Corp.- owners of, yup, Fox News and tons of other media-related businesses as well. For $580 mil. MySpace was only two years old at the time.
One of the interesting things about life is that after a while you start seeing the same things occurring in cycles. Fast-forward to 2007. Many of us may have been unwittingly witnessing the death of MySpace for the last 22 months. That’s right. I’m officially placing high odds on MySpace’s eventual demise and consignment to the has-been pile with the likes of AOL.
MySpace is a piece of crap
Yup, you didn’t misread that sub-title. How strange an assertion for someone who just built a music discovery tool that is completely reliant on MySpace, you say? I originally resisted invitations from my friends to join MySpace because I thought it was a fad. And in a way, I was right. When I first joined it was actually a mildly fun experience to link up with friends scattered across the globe and look at hot girl pics. Now, I just check for messages, try to send a cheeky comment every once in a while, maybe post a new song/pic, and I’m out. Why? Because ultimately MySpace is not actually that useful. And I know there are tons of users like me, and even more who won’t use MySpace at all for this very reason. I’m a MySpace user because of the relationships established with my 200-odd “friends” (let’s be honest here, most of them are acquaintances) and because I can post songs. Period. MySpace is not giving me anything more than when I first established my account, and a significant part of that was novelty. You may think that’s okay, but it is the root of their downfall.
At this point MySpace has only two things going for it: tons of (individual) users, and tons of bands. Something like 78 million all told, or at least that’s what they say. At any rate, it’s a huge number. I’m not rich or well-connected, so I couldn’t pony up the millions of dollars needed to create my own social networking site with millions of users that would allow me to validate/invalidate my long-held theories that underlie the Musedot concept. That’s why Musedot is built on MySpace, because that’s where the people are. The theories have been validated, so now I can continue the R&D efforts. This in no way means that Musedot will continue to utilize the MySpace network, and in fact I doubt that’s how things will ultimately turn out.
MySpace Hates Geeks
I don’t think geeks should run the show, they (hey! I consider myself a nerd) have their own weaknesses, like an incomprehension of how less socially inhibited people act in the real world, but for an Interweb company you gotta have at least one hardcore nerd/geek in the top cabal. From the very outset, the actual MySpace infrastructure was a piece of crap. I know because I’m an old man-level web applications developer in the same technologies used to build MySpace and I can tell you my very first application was better than their most recent. And I’m not talking about the “simplicity” of the Web design. Google’s Web design is even more simplistic.
No self-respecting nerd/geek developer with any kind of real power within the company would have allowed that to happen. Contrast the MySpace approach with that of the aforementioned Google, which has invested an ungodly amount of cash into server farms and infrastructure so that every time you go to Google you have a great user experience (meaning fast and accurate). The founders of Google are computer science uber geeks. You do the math. This is extremely important because geeks/nerds are interested in making useful things, while everyone else is interested in either using those things and/or selling them. Case closed.
MySpace’s Business Strategy is Myopic and Moronic
These days, whenever I login to my MySpace account I feel like I’ve been transported into a Disney-new-Times-Square-Fox-Giant-Corporation-advertisement orgy. And that’s because I have. I don’t know what the ads are for, because I never pay attention to them, but I can almost guarantee you that if you turned on the TV you’ll see ads from some of the very same companies. In the almost two years since their acquisition by one of the richest corporations in the history of human civilization, with access to billions in internal financing, the people at MySpace have managed only to turn my “personalized” account into a cacophony of pre-Interweb hucksterism. No doubt this has caused them to rake in considerable money in the short term, enhanced even further by their under-investment in technical infrastructure, but it also undoubtedly aids in blinding them to their impending doom.
Now, I don’t have anything against ads or making money, but I am forthrightly opposed to filthier than filth rich people who don’t- in fact- give a damn about music, controlling the music business. I’ll get back to that in a minute, but for now let me point out the fact that the MySpace “management” is apparently pursuing a retrograde strategy that will prove unsustainable. In the cold focus of history, the ubiquitous “banner advertisements” and related ilk that we see today will be seen as a clumsy attempt to bring previously successful “offline” approaches to a new medium (the Interweb) at a time when it was too immature to support other business models and the people in the “new” marketing industry didn’t really know what the hell they were doing. This too shall pass. Not in the short term, and maybe not even in the medium term, but eventually. In it’s place you’ll see technologies that will enable you, of your own volition, to get what you want when you want it, with no advertising involved. Let’s take music for example (surprise!). It will go something like this: You’ll say to yourself, “Hmmm… it would be nice to have some new music right now but I don’t have anything particular in mind. Let me jump on the Interweb and get some.” You’ll have a selection of various tools that will allow you to find some kick ass new music quickly and efficiently. The relationships involved will be:
You -> Interweb tool -> Download new music
That’s it. No advertising, no Sony, no EMI, none of that. You, technology, music. And the Interweb company that makes the tool will take a cut of your music purchase, because it enabled this to happen. The remainder will go to whoever owns the music, which could be Sony or EMI, or it could be your mom. It doesn’t matter. And everyone will be happy, except perhaps for the shareholders at Sony and EMI. The goon squad also known as the RIAA and which is the militant arm of Sony-BMG-EMI-Universal-TimeWarner, is waging a reactionary shock and awe campaign based on the obviously deluded notion that they can somehow prevent this from happening.Some quite intelligent people who also think about such things refer to the these types of technologies as Web 2.0. It doesn’t matter what you call it, all that matters is that it’s going to happen. If you understand that you’ll understand that the MySpace business strategy is moronic.
Rupert Murdoch is an old ass man
Like grandpops old. He is also the founder and generalissimo of News Corp. (Did you read that BBC article yet? You really should). Now, I admire and respect Mr. Murdoch’s business acumen, although his tenuous relationship with the truth is a bit off putting, but you can’t get more old school than that. And remember, he is the top level big boss at MySpace. Which brings me to my next point.
You Got Served
The founder and generalissimo of facebook.com is a 23 year old geek (from what I can tell). I don’t actually know much about facebook, yet. Of course I’d heard of it quite a while ago, but never had a reason to join. My friends are on MySpace. However, I do know that facebook is huge, and growing fast… and did I mention that the founder/CEO is a 23 year old geek? Recall what I said earlier about geeks vs. the world (have you ever heard of Bill Gates?). Most importantly, facebook just announced that they are going to open up their site to other software developers and companies as a platform upon which these third parties can build tools that enhance the value of the entire facebook network. I took a brief look at the technical specifications. Very interesting. This is a strategy stolen directly from the Microsoft military doctrine. Anyone remember how well that worked?
The bottom line is that if the MySpacesters don’t mobilize all the troops around a new surge strategy, and post haste, there’s a very high probability they will be served in the form of facebook’s lunch. So far, their response to the facebook announcement has sounded like dribble from the mouths of junior marketing associates.
Let me try to describe to you the basic outlines of this highly probable annihilation. Let’s say mr. Zuckerberg of facebook is a young Mike Tyson, and Rupert Murdoch is an old… president Bush. Not the guy in office now, his Dad. Imagine they meet on a dark bed-stuy street and the old president says something rather raw about Mike’s moms. Close your eyes and imagine what would *probably* happen. Let’s try some other analogies. As way of a rough proxy, imagine that the MySpacesters are going up against a Rommel Panzer division with a wet sock filled with rocks; or they’re bringing a knife to a nuclear war; or… I gotta million of ‘em.
That’s ridiculous!- you say. MySpace has a billion users and is owned by a company with billions of dollars run by a billionaire! Raise your hand if you remember friendster. I used to be on friendster. Not anymore. It’s still around, a pale shadow of its former life as the master dominator of the then newfangled social networking thing. That fall from such a lofty perch happened in the space of less than two years, and the folks eating that tasty lunch were none other than the by now much-maligned-by-me MySpacesters. How long does it take to create an account at any of these Interweb sites? Ten minutes? Think about it.
This is How it Will All Go Down
All of this is important to me, and perhaps to some of you as well, because in the very near future it will finally be possible to put the control of the music business in the hands of the people to whom it rightfully belongs: the artists and the fans. The toolmakers shall rise up and join hands with the people and the crown shall be passed for a 1000 year reign. In this way the formerly poor shall become rich and the once mighty will lose their shirts. And their pants and socks too. As for the size of the business opportunity this entails just take the combined marketing and advertising budgets of the Sony-BMG-EMI-Universal-TimeWarner Axis Powers for starters, and eventually raise that to the 9th power. Did I mention that I make tools and music?
Musedot Is Not the Bomb
No it’s not, and in fact it’s very limited, mainly because it’s a hack of MySpace, but most importantly because the things I’m predicting are only now becoming possible. I’m making all the above predictions without any insistence that either I personally will become a successful toolmaker, or Musedot will be a successful tool. Musedot is not the culmination of anything other than my 12 year quest to determine how one could use Interweb technology to help you find music you would like if only you knew about it. This is just the very early rumblings of the insurgency. I’ve been at it for 12 years and intend to be at it for at least another 12, and if not me than there will be someone to take my place. You’ll see.
Join the revolution!
The General
“The first, the supreme, the most far-reaching act of judgment that the statesman and commander have to make is to establish … the kind of war on which they are embarking.”
- Karl von Clausewitz