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jwatts55

Articles: Making Cents - 0 views

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    I'm sure each generation of musicians feels they've lived through a time of tremendous change, but the shifts I've witnessed in my relatively short music career-- from morphing formats to dissolving business models-- do seem extraordinary. The first album I made was originally released on LP only, in 1988-- and my next will likely only be pressed on LP again.
perezmv

http://oreilly.com/digitalmedia/2006/08/17/inside-pandora-web-radio.html - 0 views

  • Pandora (which is also the name of the company) grew out of the Music Genome Project, which company founder Tim Westergren began six years ago.
  • He became fascinated with the way directors described the music they were looking for, which led to his wondering what made people enjoy certain types of music. He asked himself, "If people haven't found any music that they love since college, and artists are struggling to find an audience, is there a role for technology to help bridge the gap?"
  • Westergren started the Genome Project from the idea of creating a platform for connecting people with music that they'll love based on music they already enjoy. The project uses experts called "music analysts" to deconstruct music into its fundamental parts and capture the results into a database. Pandora has 40 professional musicians who come to the office every day and listen to one song at a time, analyzing each in anywhere from 200 to 400 dimensions. (The dimensions are somewhat different for each genre of music.)
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  • Pandora chose the dimensions because they are quantitative. For instance, how breathy are the vocals? Is the music diatonic or chromatic? The music analysts are trained to be able to score songs consistently. In fact, one of the test cases is, "Could a group of 10 musicologists listen to a song and agree on one score for a particular element?"
  • vector space.
  • "What is exciting about the Music Genome Project, with respect to Pandora the radio-listening experience, is that by understanding the music on a song-by-song basis we can put together a playlist that has a much more natural ebb and flow than you might be able to do with collaborative filtering data," Conrad says.
  • "I think curator is the right word," Conrad replied. "Of all the financial models that could be leveraged to make Pandora a successful business, the 'play for pay' model runs completely spiritually opposite to the founding of the company.
  • I asked what Pandora was doing to avoid being influenced by big record labels, which have been widely accused of corrupting traditional radio through payola schemes.
  • "Since we use a human analyst to analyze song by song, we've experimented with using a smaller number of elements," he continued. "We've determined that you can't create interesting playlists with only 20 attributes. But we do keep an eye on machine listening as it might provide a way to augment the manual analysis."
  • I ask myself, "What's this song doing in my Bill Evans station? This song should be in my 'Soft Jazz Guitar' station. Why can't I tell Pandora to place this tune in the appropriate station?"
  • "It's fascinating to me that you raise that particular example," Conrad said. "Because the scenario that you just described is--after we evolved the product over five months and took a lot of low-hanging fruit off the table--probably the number-one listener request.
  • Pandora creates playlists with a "matching engine," written in C and Python, for each listener station. This engine builds the low-level linkage to the "source" music (the music that listeners indicate they like) and the music that actually gets played (a mixture of what the listener explicitly indicated, mixed with music that the Pandora service believes listeners will like). The replication system is Slony.
perezmv

How Do Companies Make Any Money in Digital? - 0 views

  • The entire infrastructure of the ad industry has been re-architected, and redeployed.  The critical change is that the infrastructure is now open across the entire "stack" of technologies, and pretty much every major platform is open and extensible. This means that new companies can innovate on specific problems without having to build out their own copy of the stack.  They can build the pieces they care about, the pieces that add specific value and utility for specific purposes – e.g. New Monetization Models for Publishers and Brand Advertisers, New Ad Formats, New Ad Inventory Types, New Impression Standards, New Innovation across Mobile, Video and Social, and so on.
  • targeting systems
George Neff

The Netflix effect: how binge watching is changing television | News | TechRadar - 0 views

  • The bold new era of content distribution and technological efficiency has served up entire, original award-winning series series like Netflix' House of Cards and Orange is the New Black for consumption in one sitting, if the viewer desires.
  • Quite frankly, we've never had it so good.
  • empowered the consumer.
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  • We spoke to television scholars and media psychologists on whether marathon viewing is really enhancing our experience, beyond the buffet. If we can have everything, does everything mean anything?
  • "Even a single episode has so many highs and lows that by the end of it you're so beaten up, you're less receptive to the emotional and intellectual ideas being put forth. Yet still we click and watch another one."
  • Netflix says it's more organic that way – it also means that if you don't do anything the episodes will just keep on coming.
  • With more traditional distribution models there is arguably more of an opportunity to let the experience sink in, find an appreciation and look forward to the next part of the journey.
  • "Breaking Bad has become the greatest example of the perfect show for binge viewing, he tells us. "Not only is it okay to binge view a series like that, but it is a better way to watch it.
  • you can understand the inner workings of these stories if you view them in more concentrated chunks
  • binge watching is the antithesis to how TV traditionally works.
  • Now, thanks to the advent of high-speed internet and the connected services they've enabled, technology has surpassed the content.
  • Ironically enough, the week-to-week format we enjoyed/endured during our last hours with Jesse and Walt proved to be an anomaly for millions who latched on to the growing buzz and raced through the previous five-and-half-seasons during the 12-month pre-climax hiatus – the binge before the episodic storm.
  • "I think Breaking Bad is probably as close as we're going to come to such a universal, cultural televisual event again," said film and television historian and associate professor at UCLA Jonathan Kuntz.
  • Breaking Bad, as it turned out, bridged the two eras perfectly, offering a stunning paradox of each distribution model's merits.
  • "The generation coming up now, all they're going to know is on demand. What pleasure they derive from anything will come from that,"
  • Another factor to consider in the great binge debate is that feeling of withdrawal when we run out of new episodes.
  • "The [binge viewing] experience is so good that you feel physically sad that it's over. That sense you had is more attached to it being a great artistic experience,"
  • The strength of our desire for gratification plays into a debate the psychologists call Connoisseur vs Addict. The former loves to be present in the moment, can savour the engagement and sees how everything ties into a beautiful package. The latter just needs a fix.
  • "An addict is working on a two-pronged schema, which is aspiration and completion. Aspiration is thedopamine-fuelled desire to recapture a feeling," he told TechRadar."When you get the completion, it's not about the rush, but ultimately about achieving the aspiration of the completion. When things are that accessible, what happens to the value of the product?"
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