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In the World According to Rags, Rags suggests that most of the innovation in the music industry is coming from start-ups, naming a few that have new business models or another new way to exploit the social graph. He goes on to ask the question "What companies are innovating in music?"

I agree that much innovation is coming from startups and I can point out a few that Rags didn't mention: The Echo Nest, The Sixty One, Muxtape (currently offline), the Hype Machine (not to mention the venerable but still innovative sites like Last.fm and Pandora). But I suggest that if Rag's is looking for innovation that he should also look at the academic communities that are doing research around music. For instance, there is lots of interesting research being done in the music information retrieval community - and the yearly conference, called ISMIR, just concluded this week in Philadelphia. Companies that are interested in music discovery pay close attention to what is going on at ISMIR - companies like Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, HP, Nokia, Philips, Last.fm, Pandora, Gracenote, MusicIP and Sun. This year's ISMIR had some interesting technologies that will someday find their way into the next startups - improved content-based recommenders to help people find music in the long tail, novel interfaces for helping people explore large collections of music, new techniques for data mining the social graph for music recommendation, ways to use social tags to enhance our understanding of music, techniques for detecting cover songs, etc. I hope that Rag's will take a look at some of the papers (or even just the summaries I've posted over the last week in this blog) to get an idea of where real innovation in the music industry is going to come from.