Spotify's impact on our culture is "People like to stream music. Here is a service that lets them do so.". You didn't need the Media Lab to come up with that idea, and indeed, it didn't.
Yeah OPs comment is some sort of idealistic historical revision that ignores the fact that there were a myriad of streaming services that predated Spotify.
It's a pretty weird thing flex about too. Like isn't streaming music based on preferences pretty easy?
> Yeah OPs comment is some sort of idealistic historical revision that ignores the fact that there were a myriad of streaming services that predated Spotify.
That may be true, but Negroponte was proselytizing streaming media back in the early 90s, long before anything like Spotify or Netflix were actually practical. Did all this hot air have any effect? I have no idea. But from where I was sitting, he was definitely pushing hard for something that others were not at the time.
Also, the first music recommendation service I ever heard of was started at the Media Lab. It was called Ringo, and you'd email it a list of your favorite bands, and it would then email you back recommendations for other music you might like. Ringo was implemented using some sort of statistical correlation amongst other people's lists of favorite bands.
Ringo was eventually spun off into a company called Firefly which ran a music community website that used this technology. It didn't do so well, though, and was eventually bought by Microsoft, which shut down the website about a year later.
> Like isn't streaming music based on preferences pretty easy?
Sure, but I don't think that doing it very well is. I mean they typically do an okay job, but I've yet to find one that just blows me away with its ability to find music for me that I will love.
Yes, I'm introduced to some good new music this way. But I also have to listen to a lot of dreck too.
In terms of mass-market success, goodness of recommendations is like, #12 on the list of must-have features for a (streaming) music service.
#1 is "It must have all of the music", which is really a lawyer problem, not an engineering problem.
(#2-#11 are just variations of "No no, I mean all the music", "Does it have really old music, like X?" "What about really niche music like Y?" "Oh, oh, what about Z? I bet it doesn't have Z.")
> In terms of mass-market success, goodness of recommendations is like, #12 on the list of must-have features
Well, maybe that's why they generally are not so great.
On the other hand, Pandora has traditionally existed with playing music that you'll like, but didn't explicitly select, as its reason for existence. Maybe that's why it seems to do a better job at this than other streaming services.
> Like isn't streaming music based on preferences pretty easy?
That must be why Spotify constantly fills my once useful “discover weekly” feed with what I would describe as “Ambient Indian Buddhist Trip-Hop”. Not really what I wanted at all. Though this week it seems to be “Ambient Irish Bagpipe”, which is also not at all what I wanted.
So, no... I think Spotify has a long ways to go to learn how to give me what I want...
> Like isn't streaming music based on preferences pretty easy?
No, I don't think so.
Millions upon millions have been spent pouring money into recommendation engines (which is an advanced "based on preferences"). Companies like Netflix know that they can keep customers that much longer if they're good at finding the needles in the haystack for each specific customer, and they famously offered a million-dollar bounty to anyone that could improve their algorithm by even a few percentage points (and, just as famously, everyone recognized that it would be worth far more than a million dollars to them).
Pandora tried to do it by creating a "music genome" for every single song in its database, with dozens of attributes per song, thus linking disparate songs though much more than just "genre."
Nowadays it's pretty much "throw a massive database at a ML system, and pump out 'people who like these 10 songs tend to like this song'", but for a long time those systems were crappy. And, even now, its hard for those systems to find a balance between showing you something that matches what you've listened to, and playing you ten nearly-identical songs in a row.
Companies make all sorts of acquisitions, insightful or random. The acquisition of Echo Nest certainly isn't the reason for "the impact of Spotify on our culture". I assure you, Spotify's success was in its licensing a very large selection of music to stream. Everything else is marginal.
Not true at all. Do you think Facebook would be as big without their feed, or YouTube as big without recommended videos or their front page?
Recommendations and turning that into useful products (like auto generated playlists, mood playlists, upcoming talent, etc) are a huge draw to Spotify and creates a high bar for new competitors (including Apple Music).
that's a great question - those approaches where based on acoustic similarity. Later approaches, including Echo Nest, included social features.
An example I used to use with Brian was that Bad Religion and NOFX sound similar. However, fans of one of those bands weren't often fans of the other. In this model, people have a need for an amount of that sound and a social connection, NOT a need for more and more and more of that sound.
Another diff is that Pandora used human music experts where EN used machine listening. They have some overlap, and some differences, but obv the machine listening is offline.
