These much-trailed Apple product announcements seem to whip up more fervour and excitement each time they occur. I received chivvying emails from Apple asking me if I was going to attend the live satellite broadcast from America at 6pm at the Business Design Centre in Islington; I wasn't able to make it – but in any case, so many people were liveblogging, twittering and simulcasting the event that it wasn't too difficult to pretend that you were there, whooping and punching the air as each new announcement was made. But the biggest news, as reported in today's Independent, was that Steve Jobs isn't dead. The other announcements, by comparison, seemed fairly mundane.
We were shown the "funnest iPod ever" (not the funniest, the funnest) which in essence means that it's thinner, has a built in speaker, is better suited for gaming and gives you the ability to shuffle tracks (either accidentally or on purpose) by shaking the device. Alongside that was a sleeker iPod nano – but the thing that tied these products together was the unveiling of a new feature within iTunes called "Genius", which is incorporated into the new version 8 (available for download now.)
Those of us who have been using music recommendation services such as last.fm for a while now will immediately see what Apple are trying to do with Genius, but will also identify instantly the ways in which it fails to match up. The concept: you play a track, and a sidebar tells you other tracks that you might like – and that you don't have – based on a corpus of data that they've amassed from other anonymous music lovers who also have the Genius feature enabled. To have such a service integrated within one window is obviously a major plus-point (other music recommendation services may link with iTunes software, but still require you to flip backwards and forwards to access them) but its limitations were immediately apparent when I started playing around with it at 5.30am during a bout of insomnia.
Firstly, the service is at an embryonic stage; of course, recommendations will improve over time as data from our listening habits is amassed, but last.fm and the like are streets ahead in that regard. Secondly, and more importantly, it'll only recommend tracks that are available to buy in the iTunes Store. I can see how this could well help to drive music sales (there's a strange compulsion to click a button to buy a track you're missing by a certain artist, and know that you'll only be set back 79p) but the absences are notable. iTunes, while undoubtedly the market leader in music download sales, certainly doesn't have an exhaustive catalogue, and you only have to play a Beatles track in iTunes to find a message in the Genius sidebar claiming that "no matches can be found for your specific selection". Which isn't true, of course, they've just decided that they can't find matches to songs that they're able to sell to us.
Of course, no music recommendation service is perfect – mainly because of that unpredictable factor of eclectic human taste – but the fact that Genius is more of a sales pitch than a suggestion box probably means that I'll stick with last.fm for the time being.
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The Napster subscription service offers something it calls "your radio" - a bunch of recommended songs based on your library and those of others with similar musical tastes. The nice thing is that you can quickly play through the selection, skipping songs that dont appeal and keeping those that do. You cant use it as a mobile service (in the UK at least) but when I'm at home and plugged in, I'm nearly always pleasantly surprised at the tunes it throws out - both new music, chart stuff and classics.
You've covered the pros and cons of music subscription services previously, but I must say I'm very impressed with the way Napster recommendations work.
Posted by: Tim | Wednesday, 10 September 2008 at 09:57 PM