Recommending More Listeners

Back when I was at school, this dynamic was enacted in the real world - if you were a fan of The Cure, chances are that you also listened to The Smiths, and if you didn’t, then one of your fellow Cure-fans would probably introduce you.

Now that the process has moved online, the scale has vastly increased, and collaborative filtering is quite effective at providing decent new music recommendations when dealing with popular artists or tracks.

Recommending The Unheard

The danger of CF is that listeners can sometimes be sucked into a ’similarity vortex’ - a set of artists may be so closely linked that the recommendations keep coming back on themselves, with very little ‘discovery’ taking place. It may be hard for new artists to break into this circle, and the recommender may not help listeners to break out.

It is also true that CF requires large numbers of listeners for it to work properly, so the more esoteric your tastes, the less likely it is to satisfy your needs.

An alternative approach is to set listener behaviour aside and focus on the properties of the music itself. This is akin to what Pandora is attempting with its Music Genome Project - categorising songs by their sonic, musical and structural qualities, rather than by who is actually listening to them.

Have You Heard The Mufin, Man?

The idea of algorithmically categorising music has been around for quite a while - I previously wrote about hit prediction software that makes record company executives’ jobs easier by calculating the odds of a particular track becoming a blockbuster.

Paul Lamere is a researcher at Sun Labs who deals with music recommendations at a very in-depth level. He recently posted his impressions of a new content-based music suggestion site, Mufin.

Lamere’s overview of Mufin is worth reading, as is his strategy for exposing a CF filter masquerading as a content-based filter. In some cases, it seems as if the system actually resorts to random-number-based recommendations.

However, the art and science involved in musical content filtering is extremely complex, and will require vast investments of research and ingenuity to get right. For the sake of all those who seek new and obscure music (without having to wade through hours of mud), let’s hope someone works it out…

Kore 2 On The Outside

Although it is possible to buy Kore 2 in a software-only version, the hardware controller really opens up the possibilities for this instrument, particularly in a live environment.

It’s a fairly small and solid unit, with a brushed aluminium chassis giving it a sturdy feel. The illumination on the box is a fairly striking red; the rotary controllers are touch-sensitive and can glow at different levels depending on what settings they are reporting. All in all, it looks quite evil - if Darth Vader was a DJ, he’d probably use one of these.

Kore 2 Under The Hood

Kore 2 can run either as a stand-alone application or as a plugin for your DAW of choice (VST, AU or RTAS). In terms of processing, Kore 2 is powered by the engines of Reaktor, Absynth, Massive, FM8, Kontakt and Guitar Rig - it’s no surprise, therefore, that the quality of sound it produces is second to none.

The other strengths of Kore 2 are usability, tweaking and performance. The browser allows you to quickly scan through all available patches by type and attribute; if you’re looking for a mellow arpeggiated synth sound, you’ll find it in seconds. You can also tag sounds with your own attributes, or remove the default ones if they don’t suit your definitions.

Morphing Sounds In Kore 2

Although patches created in Reaktor may be played in Kore 2, it doesn’t facilitate such grass-roots sound design/synthesis itself. That’s not to say that you can’t create new sounds in Kore - far from it. In fact, new sounds are what really makes Kore 2 shine…

The package comes with 500 patches, but because of Kore’s unique sound morphing feature, the number of sounds directly available out of the box actually numbers in the thousands.

For each patch, eight default parameter settings have been created, and these can be selected directly by pressing the button beside the corresponding knob. The difference in sound between these presets generally ranges from quite subtle to extreme variations. The 8 rotary knobs can be used to smoothly transition between sound settings within patches; this creates a morphing effect that often produces surprising results.

Kore 2 For Performance

You can set up performance patches if you’re planning on using Kore 2 in a live setting, and you can then move through these patches without needing to use a mouse or look at your computer screen.

All the information you need is displayed on the Kore 2 screen, and the various navigation buttons light up to show you what options are available. While I haven’t tried this system at a gig yet, it certainly does seem to tick all the right boxes.

For more details on using Kore 2, the series of videos on the Native Instruments site is a great introduction.

Another essential destination for Kore 2 users is the CDM Kore minisite, which regularly provides updates on Kore-related tips and tricks, as well as a very handy guide to using Kore.

Kore 2 Early Impressions

Personally, I’m just getting to grips with Kore 2, as I’ve only had it for a couple of weeks now, but I must say I really like it. Every time I use it I discover something new, and even without its live potential it would be a worthy investment.

The availability of Kore Sound Packs is another canny move by NI, and provides a wealth of mini-upgrades for those who want to explore new sounds without necessarily investing in a full copy of Reaktor or Massive… and the sonic quality of these smaller products is likely to act as a gateway to the flagships for a large number of users.

Paid-Per-Listen Streaming Radio

If you opt in to Last.fm’s royalty program, you can get paid when someone listens to your music on their site. There are different rates in place depending on the type of stream. For Canabrism, the rates broke down like this:

• Free On-Demand: 0.004 cent per stream
• Radio: 0.0041 cent per stream

Obviously, these are very small numbers and one would need a lot of traffic to see any real benefit, but it’s a start - and an encouraging step up from zero monetisation. Digital Audio Insider posted some results also, and they have a higher return per stream, so it may be the case that as you grow in popularity, your rates also improve.

Streams Of Consciousness

Another new feature that Last.fm artists should be aware of is the addition of an RSS feed option on artist pages. If you have a blog, it would probably be a good idea to add a feed here - gaining valuable backlinks and a potential traffic funnel in the process.

Streaming Radio Baby

If you have released a CD via CD Baby, then your Last.fm earnings should automatically be paid to your CD Baby account. Although CD Baby takes a 9% cut, they apparently negotiated a better deal overall, so that you may actually get more per stream than if you were being paid by Last.fm directly.

Another point to note is that when you release a record through CD Baby (or any major label), Last.fm will prevent you from editing that album’s page on their site. Also, if one of your other albums has the same track title as one of your label releases, then that album may be locked as well.

For example, the Canabrism album “Bodkin Squad” is a live/DJ set that features versions of a couple of tracks from the CD Baby album “Between Things Together“. Even though the former was released on the Podcomplex label, Last.fm automatically locked it down as a CD Baby property because of the duplicated track titles…

Tall Tales Of The Long Tail

In a nutshell, the long tail states that the future of selling is in “less of more”. Rather than having a few immensely valuable blockbusters, sales will consist of large numbers of less popular products. If the head (blockbusters) accounts for 20% of the total number of products and the tail consists of 80%, the long tail theory suggests that the least popular 80% should be more valuable than the head.

According to research undertaken by economists Will Page and Gary Eggleton, with Mblox founder Andrew Bud, this is not the case.

In fact, after analysing tens of millions of transactions at a major digital music site, they found that 80% of music inventory sold no copies at all.

Ahead Of The Curve

The curve of music sales uncovered by this research follows a Log Normal Distribution, rather than the Power Law Distribution (related to the Pareto Principle) envisaged by Anderson.

Andrew Bud explained the findings of his research thus:

The Long Tail’s argument is that the pattern of consumption for media is bent out of shape by the limits of the shops selling them. Digital media lets the nature of people’s demand flow free. Now we’ve seen what happens when tens of millions of choices are thrown in the air and people can go pick them up. What was astounding was the degree of inequality between the head and the tail - by a factor of three. It’s specifically the Log Normal shape that leads to a rather poverty stricken Tail.

The Confusion Of Choice

Although it may not be prudent to predict the fate of an entire economy based on results derived from one online music distributor, the findings will probably resonate with many independent musicians.

With zero barriers to entry for the music sales market, consumers are flooded with choices. This actually seems to be contracting the head, rather than expanding it - and there is an ever-growing dead zone of music for which there is no demand at all.

In this environment of unlimited access, listeners will rely more and more upon their filters of choice to help them decide what to listen to - whether these be the music charts, music blogs or their friends and social groups.

Learning Your Scales

To survive in such an environment, it may be more important than ever to scale up. When the vast majority of players are small, having a larger presence becomes the key differentiator. This creates an incentive for musicians to become part of a larger collective, either in partnership with other artists or by outsourcing (hiring) work that other people can do for them more effectively.

This is something that Derek Sivers is investigating at the moment with his MuckWork project… it seems that the future of the music industry is most likely to revolve around entities that are built from the roots up, rather than the top down.

If You’re So Inclined…Monome Tilty Snake

Not exactly revolutionary, but an interesting new application for an interesting interface. The Monome is basically a customisable controller featuring a grid of illuminated buttons, the functions of which can be determined by the user. As such, it’s ideal for musicians who like creating their own applications, with many Monome users being fans of MAX/MSP. Here we see the Monome customised as a game of ‘Snake’, where its inbuilt accelerometers are used as the controls.

Composition On The Table

Table-based interfaces really came to the fore when Bjork used the ReacTable on her Volta tour, but of course the underlying concept has been around for quite a while.

Toshio Iwai has his own version of ‘mixed reality’ interface - computer-generated images on the table are projected from above, and the images respond to the user’s touch as if they were physical objects. Thus, by touching the interface, the user can change its appearance and also interact with the music and sounds produced by the installation.

No Interface Is A Good Interface

Let’s face it - there’s only so far you can go with boxes, knobs and tables. What a musician really wants is to be able to get those song ideas straight from her head onto disc, without any of this tedious mucking about with instruments and recording studios.

This scenario might still be a few years from realisation, but progress is being made in the area of using brainwaves to control computers. A couple of years ago, MIT Medialab devised a racing game whereby the participants had to relax to make their on-screen characters go faster, as the characters responded to the player’s pulse rate, detected via physical sensors.

Since then, much research has been done on making computers respond directly to brain activity. Although still in its infancy, this area is already showing promise, and I wouldn’t be surprised if I were someday able to control my entire recording studio simply by thinking happy thoughts…