The nuTsie challenge - Gnomes vs. Geeks

In response to Pandora's recent warnings that it may go out of business due to the ongoing music licensing issues, nuTsie (yet another music streaming service) has issued A nuTsie challenge:
    The Challenge dares every Pandora user to try nuTsie for one day and then to let us know which service they prefer. If Pandora has more votes than nuTsie at the end of this October, nuTsie's own Dave Dederer, founding member of the rock band The Presidents of the United States of America, will write and record a witheringly sincere love song to Pandora's CEO, Tim Westergren, and put it on the nuTsie.com home page for a week. Dave invites Tim to reciprocate the bet.
The folks at nuTsie do have a sense of humor: The nuTsie Challenge is a creation of nuTsie's elite in-house think tank, the Music Gnome Project. The Music Gnome Project believes that music is magical and strange and unpredictable, not some geeky science experiment.

However, I think Dave had better start tuning his guitar ... my nuTsie trial didn't go too well. I started with alternative metal band 'Breaking Benjamin'

nutsie-1.png

nutSie was able to play a few tracks by Breaking Benjamin, but then took a hard left turn and started to play the Simple Symphony, by Benjamin Britten. Ouch! This was followed shortly thereafter by South African jazz vocalist Sathima Bea Benjamin. The nuTsie song transitions were giving me iPod whiplash as I was dragged through a number of wildy different genres.

nutsie-2.png.

It looks like the Music Gnome project is having a bit of a hard time distinguishing between all of the different artists with 'benjamin' in their names. That certainly would explain why they think that music is magical and strange and unpredictable.

I'll give nuTsie a fair trial for a whole day, but I suspect if nuTsie continue to make these very basic metatdata mistakes that Tim and the rest of the Pandora gang shouldn't be too worried - I suspect that in the war between the Gnomes and the Geeks, the Geeks will win.

Posted on: Oct 02, 2008

Posted by: plamere

Category: General

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Comments:

My Harry Nilsson nuTsie radio station was peppered with t.A.T.u songs. Zowie!

Posted by Zac on October 02, 2008 at 01:05 PM EDT #

Hi Paul,

Thanks for giving it a go and the good article.
Unlike Pandora's "our experts know best" approach,
our recommendations are based on other people who have
music in their collections similar to yours, not based
on artist names (which would be a weird way to do recommendations, for sure).

We do find that many people have mixes of all kinds of interesting
music in their collections, and this does lead to a much wider
and more interesting variety of music from our recommendations than Pandora.

I've you've uploaded your iTunes lists our recommendations also try to find good music that is not in your collection - Pandora requires you to train it thousands of times to get anywhere close to the same level of personalization.

Sincerely,

Bob Wise
VP Engineering
www.nuTsie.com

Posted by Bob Wise on October 02, 2008 at 01:34 PM EDT #

I figured i'd try it myself just so I could say that I gave it a fair shot, which I did. The very first band I tried, resulted in playing at least 20 songs that were nothing like what i started with.

Pandora is much more accurate in my honest opinion, and I think nutsie needs to realize that too much "variety" isn't a good thing.

Posted by Jesse Milliken on October 03, 2008 at 02:05 AM EDT #

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