Worst music recommendation

I gave the new beta release of The Filter a quick try today. The filter is a recommender remora for iTunes.  Select a few songs in iTunes, click a button and get a set of recommendations - you know the routine  by now.   So for my quick test, I tried the song 'Bring me to Life' by Evanescence. Last.fm users call this gothic rock or gothic metal (or even female-fronted metal).   The first two recommendations from The Filter were  Kiss's 'Rock all night' and George Michael's 'Faith.'  I listened to the George Michael song (I already know that I despise Kiss), and I think I would be hard pressed to find a song that was less like 'Bring me to life'.   

Sure, this is just a quick test, but first impressions matter, especially with recommender systems.  I'm guessing that The Filter is just having the usual 'cold start' problem that plague collaborative filtering systems.  On the other hand, perhaps they are trying to create a musical version of the Unsuggester.

Posted on: Mar 21, 2007

Posted by: plamere

Category: music

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Comments:

Is it possible that there is nothing in your music collection that actually realtes to Evanescence well? if at all?

Posted by 82.111.145.211 on March 22, 2007 at 09:07 AM EDT #

Is it possible that there is nothing in your music collection that actually realtes to Evanescence well? if at all? Good question - I was using The Filter's new music recommender that recommends music from the iTunes store, not just from my own collection. I don't have any Kiss or George Michael (as far as I know) in my music collection.

Posted by Paul on March 22, 2007 at 09:27 AM EDT #

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