There’ve always been “music discovery services” floating around the Internet for years now. In all honesty, I haven’t found a single one of them that can accurately provide me with songs that I enjoy. Most of them usually ask you to name one or a couple of songs that you already like, then they’ll suggest other “similar” songs. From there, you have to manually tell the service whether you like or hate each and every song they throw at you to give them a better idea of what kinds of music to filter and present to you. What a hassle to begin with.
But it doesn’t work like that
The problem with this approach is that they’re taking a very scientific approach to music discovery. Oh, you like an R&B song? Well let’s play more R&B for you. The problem is that music doesn’t work like that. Just because you liked a particular R&B song doesn’t mean you’ll like all other R&B songs. You might have liked that first song because you liked the unique beat it had, or the unique vocals of that particular song. The fact that it was an R&B song was just a coincidence. But these “music discovery services” don’t know that. To the algorithm, both songs are tagged as R&B, so you should like both songs, right?
Of course, I’m over simplifying here. I’m sure there are many other algorithms that go into determining whether a particular song would be to your liking. But the fact remains that discovering music isn’t a scientific endeavour, but rather an intuitive one. That’s what’s so brilliant about Apple’s Genius feature. It relies on the intuition of other humans to decide what songs to suggest to you.
A little history…
For those who don’t know, Genius is a feature Apple introduced into iTunes all the way back in 2008. It’s s system that suggests songs to you based on what you already have in your library. Plenty of people saw this and immediately dismissed Genius as another way for Apple to sell you more songs from their iTunes Store. However, it goes way further than that. Genius also allows you to create playlists from your library based of off any one particular song. The genius (pun intended) of this feature and the factor that sets it apart from most other music discovery services is that instead of basing the suggestions off of the song’s descriptors, it bases it off of who else listens to that song as well, and what other songs they have in their library that you have as well. Once they find these common denominators, it’ll put it together into a playlist. The basic idea is:
Oh, both you and these 100 other users here listen to this particular song. And you have these 24 other songs that can also be found in the library of these 100 other users. I’ll put them all together into a 25 song playlist for you!
Of course once again I’m over simplifying and there are other algorithms at play here (e.g. For starters the 24 other songs they put in will most likely be the 24 most common songs among these 100 users, and they probably won’t suggest Heavy Metal songs when you chose a Pop song), but that’s the gist of how Genius works, and more importantly why it works so much better than other music discovery services.
“It just works!”
Genius is one of those Apple products that follows their mantra of “it just works”. Whenever I generate a Genius playlist, the other songs included in the playlist are oftentimes from vastly different artists, and even slightly different genres. However, for some strange reason, when I’m in the mood for that particular song I chose to build my playlist around, I will also be in the mood to listen to the other 24 songs that Genius chose for me. It works so well for me that I’ve more or less abandoned manually creating playlists because I completely rely on Genius to put playlists together for me.
Y U NO USE THIS FEATURE
And yet, despite being such a useful (and free) feature that’s included with iTunes, a surprising number of people actually don’t even know about it or use it at all. To be honest Apple didn’t even really advertise Genius much. They seemed to have made an even greater effort when it came to Ping, their attempt at a social network based around music. That turned out to be a huge flop, and rightfully so. Apple didn’t seem to realise that the last thing people wanted was another social network profile to maintain. Not to mention it hardly did anything out of the ordinary to justify their users spending time on it.
In comparison, Genius is a feature that actually works and is actually useful. Unfortunately the only problem is that few people outside of those who know the ins and outs of iTunes+iPod actually know of it at all. A problem that really needs to be rectified.
At roughly 4am or so in the morning (Singapore time of course), Apple held what was going to be its final Macworld keynote. After more than 2 decades of releasing its brand new products at what is arguably the world’s largest Mac convention, it has finally decided that 2009 will be the last time they’ll participate in Macworld.
