Duke Listens!: Visit my main blog at MusicMachinery.com

Check out my review of the new music app for Twitter - Twisten.fm over at MusicMachinery.com

Oscar's Thesis - ready to read, check out the details on MusicMachinery.com

I was using the nifty developer's API at the Echo Nest to fill out some of the data for the SXSW Artist Catalog. I encountered a bug where the API would return an HTTP response code of 500 for some artists. I posted a description of the bug, grabbed another cup of coffee and then re-ran my artist crawler. I noticed that my crawler was no longer encountering the bug. Suspecting that I may have just encountered a glitch, I went back to the Echo Nest developer's forum to add a note when I saw that they had already replied to my request and had fixed the bug. So in four minutes they had: 1) Noticed my bug report, 2) identified it as real bug, 3) fixed the bug, 4) deployed the fix, and 5) Posted a response to the bug report. I think that may be a world record bug fix time for a deployed web application. Nicely done, Echo Nest.

I've done a few more updates to the SXSW Artist catalog. I've spent quite a bit of time working on improving data quality - trying to make sure that we maximize the chance that an artist will be resolved properly. Most of the problems had to do with dealing with international characters, HTML entities and encodings. After a bit of work, I've reduced the mismatches so that we can now resolve 1136 of 1168 artists (> 97%).

I've added a 'Newest' page that shows artists that have been recently added to the list by SXSW. I've also added an artist patch up mechanism that lets me easily fix data for an artist if it is wrong. I've already used it too - the band The Hot Kicks send me some updated info that I was able to apply with the patch mechanism. And finally, I've added a link that will show you Flickr images of the artist.

I'm excited to be able to go to SXSW this year (I'm giving a talk on music recommendation). I'm especially looking forward to seeing and hearing some of the thousand-plus musicians and bands that will be playing this year at the festival. This week, the SXSW organizers posted the official list of 2009 artists with 1200 or so bands with links to their home pages. Here's the head of the list:

I found the list incredibly daunting - I had not heard of most of the artists - how would I figure out which ones I wanted to see? I could imagine me sitting in a hotel room all week in Austin paralyzed by the many options.

I decided to deal with this problem directly - I just needed to add some context to this list - some photos, a little bio, some social tags, links to music and videos. If I had all that I could more easily pick the bands that I wanted to see. And so that's what I did. Using Last.fm's and Youtube's web services, I've created my own version of the SXSW Artist catalog that fills in all of the missing context. With the catalog, I can browse the artists alphabetically, by popularity and by tag. Here's an example:

Now, with the catalog, I can, for instance, find all of the bands that have been tagged with "math rock" (there are currently 14 of them), audition them, look at their videos and decide which ones I want to see (Ecstatic Sunshine looks interesting).

Building the catalog was fun. I decided to keep it as simple as possible, just a set of static HTML pages that get updated offline. No AJAX, no servlets, nothing but HTML. By keeping it simple, I was able to create the whole thing in a day. Getting all the data was pretty easy too. It is amazing what you can do with the web services at places like Last.fm and Youtube. It would have been impossible to build this sort of site 5 years ago.

I've put the catalog online - perhaps others will find it useful too. Feel free to check out Paul's SXSW Artist Catalog.

The folks over at Last.fm have added an experimental event mapper that will show nearby events that you might be interested in on a google map. Since Last.fm knows what kind of music I like, they can map upcoming shows of artists that I've listened to on map. It's pretty neat - here's my map:

I really like this and I hope they extend this into the long tail. It'd be really neat if they could improve their event recommender to find the long tail artists that are playing in my neighborhood that I would like. It looks like their event recommender is only showing artists that I've already listened to (but I could be wrong). It'd be really helpful if their event recommender would point me to artists playing locally that I haven't heard, but might like.

Sten sent me this link to auditorium, a music-based puzzle game. It's fun and soothing at the same time.

This visualization of heavy metal band names has to be part of some PhD thesis somewhere:

In their final year project, Monitoring and Visualizing Last.fm, Christopher Adjei and Mils Holland-Cunz use data from Last.fm to create visualizations that help identify new music trends as they spread around the world. This is one of the more stunning sets of visualizations of last.fm data that I've seen.

More visualizations with (German) descriptions of their procedures and stages of development are available here.

Via Visual Complexity

This is pretty cool. The MIREX team is hosting a new evaluation that will attempt to compare music tagging algorithms using the 'Tag a Tune' (a member of the games-with-a-purpose family of labeling games). The goal of this evaluation competition is to investigate a new method of evaluating music tagging algorithms, by using them as bots in Tagatune, and measuring the number of mistakes players make in guessing whether they are listening to the same or different songs (we will call this the Tagatune metric) when paired against different algorithm bots.

The details are here: SpecialTagatuneEvaluation

Hey all - I need some help. I'm giving a short talk this week to some young folk (ages 15 to 20) - one point I'd like to make is how music discovery is shifting away from traditional recommendation ('people who like X also like Y') and toward things like guitar hero and rock band. Since the audience is the squarely in the guitar hero demographic I thought I could make the point quite easily by playing a few 'guitar hero' greatest hits. In particular I'm looking for older songs by bands that teenagers would probably never have otherwise heard if not for guitar hero.

Even though I've played GH a bit, I'm not the right age to make the best call. So to be specific - what is the best example of guitar hero leading teens to music that they would never otherwise have listened to?

First, the good news: the best online streaming music app - bar none - is launching today.

Spotify has just announced music licensing deals with Universal, Sony, BMG, EMI Music, Warner Music, Merlin, The Orchard and Bonnier Amigo. With those deals in place, Spotify has gone live. Premium access (advertising-free, paid subscription) is available now (October 7), while free, ad-supported access will be gradually made available over the next few months.

Now the bad news: Unfortunately, for those of us in the states, Spotify is only launching in the UK, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Finland, Norway and Sweden. No word yet on when they will be launching here.

Spotify is a streaming internet music application that offers on-demand access to a seemingly unlimited amount of music. In some ways, it is like iTunes - you can search and browse for music, create playlists, and play music by any artist with just a click of the mouse. But Spotify is so much better than iTunes since it gives you access to millions of tracks (all perfectly legal). With Spotify you can share playlists with other Spotify users (and they can actually listen to them), you can even create collaborative playlists where multiple users can add tracks to the list. Spotify also offers a Pandora-like radio mode that will give you an infinite playlist of music by similar artists (using AllMusic's artist similarity). You might expect that since Spotify is streaming music over the wire, that it would be slow and cumbersome - but to me, it seems to be as fast or faster than iTunes. When I click on a song, it starts playing immediately - with no stutters or drop outs (well except for that time when my wireless router was dying).

In addition to the excellent music client, there's a lot of cool stuff going on in the Spotify back room as well. Every item (artists, tracks, albums and playlists) in Spotify has a URL associated with it. This makes it easy not only to share music but for third parties to build applications that use Spotify as the music engine. (We've done that here in the Labs with our Music Explaura - when you click on the little green play button you are playing music in Spotify). Spotify also provides web services to allow 3rd parties the ability to search the Spotify catalog for artists and tracks and resolve them to Spotify URLs.

The premium subscription costs £10 per month or £100 per year in the UK. It comes with these attributes:

(Note that the premium subscription comes with two beta invites, so if you live in the USA, it is time to make a European friend). Spotify is also offering a day pass - (£1 per day) for when you are planning that romantic dinner and you don't have enough Barry White to get you through the night.

I've written about Spotify a few times already. Since then, the Spotify team has added lots of new features. For instance, there's now a 'What's New' tab that highlights music that has been recently added to the catalog, along with some artist recommendations:

They've also added a zeitgeist page that shows you what is popular on Spotify (or just what's been popular for you).

Spotify is the closest thing there is to the celestial jukebox - with (nearly) all music available on demand. I'm really excited to see where the Spotify team takes this. Congrats to the Spotify team for releasing such a great music app - (but don't spend too much time resting on your laurels - get back to work on those pesky music deals so that Spotify can be released in the U.S.!)

At ISMIR, I asked Anthony Volodkin, founder of the Hype Machine what music sites he was excited about. He pointed me to thesixtyone. I've been playing with thesixtyone for about a week now and Anthony is right, thesixtyone is really interesting.

The sixtyone is part music discovery site, part social music site, and part online game. On thesixtyone, you listen to music (almost all of it by artists you've never heard of). If you find something you like you can 'bump it' - (it's just like digging) - songs or artists that get bumped a lot hit the home page, where they get lots of visibility and lots of plays (just like Digg). Not only is getting to the front page highly rewarding for the artist, it also can be highly rewarding for you if you were an early 'bumper' of the track. That's because everything that you do on the site can earn you points. Visit the site every day, you get points. Listen to music from 'the rack' (the new bin), you get points, bump a song that then gets bumped by lots of others, you earn lots of points. Be the first person to bump a song that ultimately makes it to the front page - you get a boatload of points. As you earn points, you go up levels, just like D&D - and the higher your level, the more weight your opinion carries - higher level users can bump songs multiple times. You also get points for 'achievements' like 'disk jockey' if you attract lots of others to your 'radio station'.

I've really just scratched the surface - there is lots to do at thesixtyone - you can spend time looking for undiscovered gems, you can listen to the music that is been bumped the most, you can explore the 'favorites' of other users, you can build playlists, you can create your radio station, you can comment on tracks (the comments get turned into little popups that sometimes appear when people listen to the song) - it really does feel a bit like a D&D game - it is fun to notified via a little popup that you've just received some points or achieved some goal. And while you are doing this, you are listening to music, of all sorts of genres. The music is mostly good to excellent (with some clunkers too). And there are some big name artists - I've listened to NiN, Bjork, Jonathan Coulton and Daft Punk on thesixtyone.

thesixtyone developers have done a great job of making the site highly interactive. It is very highly polished, and is simply fun to use. The music player is integrated perfectly into the site, so no matter what you do, the music keeps on playing.

thesixtyone is a fantastic place for new artists to get their music into the ears of listeners since listeners are rewarded for finding and bumping the newest music. My friend, Sten, uploaded some tracks for his band "Hungry Fathers" and within minutes their songs had been listened to by half-a-dozen listeners. That just doesn't happen on Myspace.

It has been a long while since I've been excited by a new music site. Most 'new' music sites are just variations on the Last.fm theme - ("Let's build a social community around music!") and there just isn't any need to do that anymore, Last.fm does it so well. But thesixtyone is really doing something different - they are making it easy, fun and rewarding to explore and discover new music.

The observant browser will notice that my link to thesixtyone includes me as a referrer - yes, I'll get thesixtyone points if you follow that link and register

One of the new attendees at this year ISMIR (the Music Information Retrieval conference) was Anthony Volodkin, the founder of the music discovery site The Hype Machine. Anthony is part of the web 2.0 startup culture so he certainly knows about geeks. Here are some of Anthony's tweets during the conference:

• Haven't been so repeatedly and consistently outgeeked this way in a long time, ISMIR rocks! 06:17 PM September 15, 2008
• ISMIR's geeks outgeek Web 2.0 NY geeks by a massive margin 02:21 PM September 15, 2008
• ISMIR 2008 is hardcore-geeky, I love it! First talk is on relationship of geometry and musical consonance... !!! 06:16 AM September 15, 2008

Anthony is a great guy to talk to - he's really smart, understands better than almost anyone what it takes to build a site that people will want to visit, and perhaps most important of all - he is extremely passionate about music - which is key to success in the music 2.0 world.

One of the big takeaways from ISMIR this year for many researchers is the release of the Echo Nest developer APIs. This set of webservices solves a whole bunch of problems that typically chew up a researcher's time. With the webservices you can get all sorts of artist data such as links to MP3s for the artist(!), news, blogs, similar artists, links to videos. The Echo Nest can also give you two notions of an artist's popularity: 'familiarity' (how well the artist is known in the world) and 'hotttness'. Some examples:

Artist	Familiarity	Hotttness
Beatles	1.000	0.464
Monkees	0.834	0.000
Deerhoof	0.695	0.716
Vampire Weekend	0.840	0.545
Weezer	0.801	0.329
Mozart	0.552	0.000

As you can see Deerhoof is 'hottt' while Mozart is nottt.

The APIs are very easy to use ... in just a few minutes, I was able to use the Echo Nest API to gather links to audio for the artists in our database. The API call is:

http://developer.echonest.com/api/get_audio
    ?api_key=NOT_MY_API_KEY&name=Deerhoof&rows=2

which yields results like:

<response version="2">
    <status>
        <code>0</code>
        <message>Success</message>
    </status>
    <query>
        <parameter name="api_key">NOT_MY_API_KEY</parameter>
        <parameter name="name">Deerhoof</parameter>
        <parameter name="action">index </parameter>
        <parameter name="method">get_audio</parameter>
        <parameter name="rows">2</parameter>
    </query>

    <artist>
        <name>Deerhoof</name>
        <id>ARC51DL1187B9A9FED</id>
        <mbid>11eabe0c-2638-4808-92f9-1dbd9c453429</mbid>
    </artist>

    <results numFound="142" numShown="2" start="0">
        <doc id="a17a0f36a0d46de8ff0e2e1d450e92dd" type="audio">
            <artistId>ARC51DL1187B9A9FED</artistId>
            <artist>Deerhoof</artist>
            <release>Offend Maggie</release>
            <title>Offend Maggie</title>
            <url>http://boxstr.com/files/3627643_bugb2/Deerhoof%20-%20Offend%20Maggie.mp3</url>
            <link>http://pirika01.blogspot.com/2008/09/nwz-playlist-11.html</link>
            <date>Tue Sep 23 12:01:34 UTC 2008</date>
            <length>122</length>
        </doc>
        <doc id="998e139bd98d233b5d33455d11cbd352" type="audio">
            <artistId>ARC51DL1187B9A9FED</artistId>
            <artist>Deerhoof</artist>
            <release>Offend Maggie</release>
            <title>Offend Maggie</title>
            <url>http://mp3upload.ca/download/8373/offendmaggie.mp3</url>
            <link>http://letmeplaythemusic.blogspot.com/2008/09/you-know-you-love-me_19.html</link>
            <date>Sat Sep 20 08:00:53 UTC 2008</date>
            <length>122</length>
        </doc>
    </results>
</response>

The Echo Nest developer's API is cool stuff. I can see it being at the center of the next generation of music tech startups.