More artist resolution troubles
Last week I wrote about the trouble with resolving artist names. Here's another real-life example of the trouble. El-Producto
(aka EL-P) is (according to the Wikipedia) an American rapper, producer
and entrepreneur from NYC who is a major driving force in alternative
hip hop for over a decade. Last.fm recommends
similar artists like Canibal Ox, Company Flow, Mr. Lif, Aesop Rock,
Cage and Vast Aire. All reasonable recommendations. Musicmobs yields artists like Murs, Cage and Company Flow. Again reasonable. But iLike yields recommendations
like: Yes, Kansas, Genesis and Superior. These are not good
recommendations. It looks like iLike is confusing EL-P the rapper with ELP the prog rock band.
Lucky
for many of the music recommender sites that it is really hard to
objectively evaluate how well a recommender works, otherwise I think
some of the high profile, well-funded sites would be embarrassed when
compared to some of the smaller scrappy sites.