One of the things Apple anounced during their "Let's Rock" event on September 9 was the addition of "Genius Playlists" to iTunes 8 along with all of their iPods. Personally, I think it's an unfortunate name, especially since they already have termed something else "Genius" (their tech support people in their boutique shops). I don't think those people behind the counter came up with my playlist.
I finally gave it a try though. At first, I tried to use Groove Coverage's cover of "Poison" as my seed song, but that didn't yield any results. Then I tried The New York Doll's "Dance Like a Monkey" (one of my favorite songs plus it references one of my favorite plays).
That yielded this list (click to view larger version):
Now, it did a good job of avoiding putting any of my rap, hip hop, country, or metal music on the playlist. I listened to it all the way through, and actually thought it did a reasonably good job. I was only tempted to skip one song that I felt changed the mood of things, and the rest were fine.
So then I decided to try something in one of the other genres. I chose "I Like It, I Love It" by Tim McGraw (Kyle, I thought of you while choosing it). I got this playlist (click to view larger version):
First notice that it only gave me 19 songs (of them happened to be marked as "Country"). I had it set to create 25. Now I own 30 other Tim McGraw songs, so it was possible to find 25 similar songs I would think, but it only found 4 of those. Instead, it found all 10 of the Gretchen Wilson songs I own. While I love Gretchen Wilson at times, many of the songs on that one CD I own did not fit the mood of "I Like It, I Love It" so I actually ended up skipping over some of them when they came up.
I'm also a little suspicious about the generation process. It somehow put my Johnny Horton song on the list. Sure, Johnny Horton is country, but the rest of the list is modern country while Johnny Horton passed away in 1960, seven years before Tim McGraw was even born (and thirteen years before Gretchen Wilson existed). His style is extremely different from anyone else on the list. He was good friends with Johnny Cash and married Hank Williams' ex. I didn't think this belonged and thought it unlikely that "Genius" really collected data that said a bunch of people had this song on their playlists with the other songs I have. Even though I own both songs, I have never placed them in the same playlist as each other. I wonder if it only added the Johnny Horton because of the "country" label.
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Genius Playlists
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3 comments:
One of the most enjoyable ways I've found to get to know people on the internet is to listen to their favorite music with them. For most people, their choice of music is something that contributes to their sense of indivuality, however illusory that might be. Now there are even social websites like last.fm which are based on this phenomenon.
So this leads me to ask, what is the point of a service that takes the social aspect out of the experience? Why bother with something that will not broaden your horizons by either introducing you to new people or new kinds of music?
Maybe there is more to Genius Playlists than is apparent at this point, but I remain sceptical about its potential and regard it as yet another attempt to homogenize the human race for commercial gain.
@Andrew Smith -
I hadn't thought about the social aspect, but you're totally right. I myself use blip.fm and iLike (which has helped me find out about some of my friends liking bands and didn't realize they liked, leading us to go to concerts together).
I see Genius playlists as trying to take back the slice of the market that has moved to using services like Pandora, and hoping that you'll buy more iTunes from the sidebar to add to your dynamic playlists.
@AndrewSmith
Myself being, an increasingly antisocial (albeit I feel sad about this, but I won't evade the fact that it's true) blip on the social-networking radar, I think there's lots to be said for services like Pandora which don't depend on "the social aspect" at all. Yeah, you can see other user's info if you're curious, but the entire system is expert driven versus user-data-mining driven. Pandora provides a very structured and reliable system to say "I think like A. What else is like A?" whereas social stuff relies purely on "Who else likes A?" which is a degree apart from the social systems, and if you don't care to ever meet willow34562 who lives in Krebalakistan (or message them and say "You like Felt-Walrus? I like Felt-Walrus!!!!" (this is obvious. the system told you this)), it matters very little who this person is.
That said, I found a lot of good music in the soulseek days using the social "I like A and X likes A. X also likes B" system. But the key difference there is that soulseek enabled listening to more than a 30 second clip.
I don't think Apple has any ulterior motives to homogenize the human race. I think they're just betting we're more homogenized than we actually are, thus leaving us laughing at their claims of "genius".
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