The Pop and Policy Music Recommendation Panel
Yesterday, I sat on a panel at the Pop and Policy summit in Montreal.
The topic was music recommendation. I was joined by Brian Whitman
(founder of Echo Nest), Doug Eck (Machine Learning and music at
the University of Montreal), Diane Sammer (CEO of Goombah), and Sandy
Pearlman (MoodLogic, producer of The Clash, Blue Oyster
Cult). The panel was moderated by journalist Karla Starr (who
wrote an excellent piece on music recommendation for the Seattle Weekly).
It was fun sitting on the panel, and hearing about what everyone else thought were the issues in recommendation. Some common themes emerged: collaborative filtering has problems with coldstart and popularity biases, recommenders based solely on content tend to suck, evaluation of recommenders is a very hard problem. I had the audience take the Music Recommendation Turing Test - results were similar to what we saw in this blog; most people thought that the machine was the human and vice versa.
Although
the panel was fun, I thought the most interesting conversation was
afterwards at lunch, where all but one of the panelists spent an hour or
more, in a relaxed setting talking about music, music
recommendation. At the end we realized that we all were in the
business of music recommendation because it really is a great way to get
access to whole lot of music.