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White Paper: How Your Favorite Music Discovery Services Work

Michael Brown — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 14:15:00 -0600

Listen to the mind-numbingly repetitive radio programming on the FM dial long enough, no matter which genre you prefer, and you might conclude that only a handful of recording artists are worth listening to.

Fire up your PC and tune in to Internet radio, on the other hand, and you’ll discover an embarrassment of riches, nearly all of which you can enjoy for free and without—or at least with very little—commercial interruption. In fact, there’s so much music that you might find yourself overwhelmed. That’s where the music discovery services Last.fm, Pandora, and Slacker come in. All three services help you discover new music based on the songs and artists you express a preference for. As interesting as that concept is, what’s even more remarkable is that each service takes a completely different approach to the mission. Let’s take a look at all three.

Last.fm

Last.fm mixes Internet radio with aspects of social networking. The service started out as an Internet radio station that allowed listeners to express their preference or disdain for particular songs by using a Love or Ban button. Last.fm used this information to develop a unique profile for each user and to create dynamic playlists.

The service was later merged with the Audioscrobbler music-discovery system, a stand-alone application originally designed to record the music played on registered computers. This enabled Last.fm to collect statistics that could chart a track’s worldwide popularity. Each time you listen to a song—whether it be online or from your personal library—the tune gets “scrobbled,” meaning its title is sent to Last.fm and added to your music profile.

Last.fm analyzes your initial list of favorite artists (which you provide when you first sign up), your personal music collection, and your expressed preferences (based on your use of the Love and Ban buttons) and begins streaming songs it thinks you’ll enjoy. In that respect, it’s not terribly different from Pandora or Slacker; Last.fm becomes unique when you take its community aspect into consideration. Subscribers can join groups based on common interests, create friends lists, and view each other’s profiles. Profiles list tracks the person has recently listened to, songs in their library, as well as charts listing their top artists and tracks. The service also uses a collaborative filtering algorithm to compare your preferences with those of like-minded subscribers and build a personal recommendations page.

Pandora

Pandora takes a more scientific approach to music discovery. The company’s founders started an initiative called the Music Genome Project in 2000, with the goal of analyzing the fundamental elements of a song, and Pandora uses this data to analyze the music you listen to on the service and then recommends other songs and artists you might enjoy.

Pandora’s musicologists go much further than simply breaking a song down to its hook, chorus, and bridge; following the basic tenets of music theory, they scrutinize each song for as many as 400 distinct musical characteristics. They identify attributes ranging from major/minor key tonality (whether a song’s harmony is based on a major or minor musical scale), level of syncopation (a rhythmic quality in which emphasis is placed on upbeats, versus the more conventional downbeat), and instrumentation (which types of musical instruments are featured in the song, including a distinction between electrified and acoustic instruments). You’ll find a more complete listing at Pandora's website.

Pandora has 50 musicologists on staff adding some 15,000 tracks to the Music Genome and Pandora databases each month. When you sign up for the service, you provide it with one of your favorite songs or artists and it will use an algorithm to pick other songs and artists from its database that it predicts you’ll also enjoy.

When we told Pandora we enjoyed folk artist Guy Clark, for instance, it began playing Kris Kristofferson’s “Pilgrims Progress.” Since we hadn’t given Kristofferson much thought since the 1998 Wesley Snipes vampire flick Blade, we clicked the “Why was this song selected?” button. Pandora replied, “Based on what you’ve told us so far, we’re playing this track because it features folk roots, country influences, gospel influences, a subtle use of vocal harmony, and acoustic sonority.”

Slacker

Slacker’s name is somewhat ironic since it could be argued that this service is powered more by human effort than either Last.fm or Pandora. Like those two Internet radio stations, Slacker uses algorithms to analyze your expressed preferences and then recommend music it thinks you’ll enjoy, but Slacker is unique in that it hires professional deejays to program its stations (which is to say the deejays are choosing which songs are played on the radio stations, not that they’re writing the software that runs the show).

Slacker has 120 prefab stations, and each deejay is responsible for programming just one or two of them to ensure that the person populating the playlists is an expert in that genre. The deejays also monitor what users are listening to (or skipping, as the case may be) in order to track which songs are trending popular; they’ll then increase their rotation so that they’re played more often. But they also take care to avoid playing a particular song so much that listeners grow tired of hearing it.

Subscribers can also create custom stations based on their own musical tastes, using the familiar Love It/Ban It buttons. As you populate the station with your favorite artists, Slacker will recommend other artists in the same genre. You can fine-tune your Slacker stations with slider controls that boost or limit the degree to which the service’s recommendation algorithms expose you to new artists, play popular or more obscure tracks, and select primarily older classics or new releases.

Slacker G2 Personal Radio

Michael Brown — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 17:24:25 -0500

Slacker announced a new version of its portable radio today, and we’re happy to say the Slacker G2 kicks just as much ass as the original product we reviewed last April.

Here’s Slacker in a nutshell (for those who don’t want to re-read our previous review): The service component of Slacker is much like Pandora or Last.FM in that you can listen to music on the Internet for free (along with an occasional advertisement) while the Slacker A.I. analyzes your expressed tastes in music, and recommends new artists it thinks you’ll enjoy.

But there are trade-offs: You can't always choose which songs you want to hear, and you can skip only a limited number of tracks. Slacker also offers a subscription plan ($7.50 per month if you pay for a year at a time) that eliminates the ads, enables you to call up saved tracks at will (as long as you maintain your subscription), and allows you to skip an unlimited number of tracks.

As for the new Slacker hardware, it has all the same tools as the browser-based product, but gives you the freedom to listen to music anywhere. You can transfer music from your PC to the mobile device, or you can connect the G2 to your wireless network, and it will automatically download a batch of tunes from the Slacker website.

The G2 player also comes with the Devicescape application built in. This app enables the G2 to log on to commercial Wi-Fi hot spots -- provided you have an account with the service provider, of course.

The Slacker G2 is about half the size of its predecessor, but the base model comes with twice as much memory (4GB of flash, which is enough to store 25 of the custom radio stations you create with the service; an 8GB model capable of storing 40 stations will sell for $250). More importantly, the G2 doesn’t sacrifice any of the delicious features that made the original portable so cool.

The first-generation device was slightly larger than a cell phone, which meant it just barely fit in a shirt pocket. And while it had a gi-normous display (consuming nearly its entire face), accommodating that huge LCD forced the designers to move all the control buttons to the sides of the player, which rendered it awkward to use with one hand.

The G2’s screen is considerably smaller (2.4 inches compared to the original’s 4.0-inch screen), but it shares the player’s faceplate with all the most important buttons for controlling the device. The “favorite” and “ban” buttons—which allow you to indicate your preference or disdain, respectively, for a particular song—sit above the screen. The skip forward/skip back buttons that enable you to move up and down the tracks stored in your library are at the bottom, along with a play/pause button. The volume control is on top of the device, next to the headphone jack.

The new device retains the ability to display large album-art images and detailed artist bios. And Slacker continues to employ professional deejays to program its radio channels. As with the original device, you can use some of its storage capacity to save your own music in MP3 or WMA format.

In addition to a ubiquitous mini USB port, the G2 has a CEA 2017 docking port on its bottom, although Slacker doesn’t currently have any products capable of mating with it. The Consumer Electronics Association—the group that puts on the annual CES trade show—defined the CEA 2017 standard in the theory that it would foster a market for third-party peripherals (e.g., speaker docks), but the interface been around for more than a year, and this is the first media player we’ve seen that makes use of it. Here’s hoping we don’t have to wait for the year 2017 for it to gain traction.

As for the Slacker G2—we dig it!

Slacker Portable Radio

Michael Brown — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 10:22:47 -0500

Just when we’d concluded that there was nothing new under the sun when it comes to digital music players, along comes the Slacker Portable Radio to smash all our preconceived notions. This $200 device takes the music-discovery innovations pioneered by Pandora and Last.fm and puts them in the palm of our hand.

The hardware works with Slacker’s Internet radio service, but you don’t always need to be tied to a live Internet connection for it to work. Using your PC you can populate the radio with either pre-fab radio stations or create custom stations by populating them with your favorite artists. Slacker’s software will then identify other artists of the same vein. You can fine-tune each station by adjusting how aggressively it exposes you to artists and songs other than those you’ve identified as your favorites, how often it plays popular songs versus those closer to the fringe, and whether it plays only current tunes, just the classics, or some combination of the two.

Once you’ve done that, you download the stations and a batch of songs (in AAC Pro v2 format) to the Slacker Player via USB or an 802.11b/g network. The device supports WEP and WPA Wi-Fi security for connecting to your own network; and thanks to a recently announced partnership with Devicescape, Slacker Portable Radios can automatically connect to free Wi-Fi hotspots in participating hotels, airports, and restaurants (including Starbucks and McDonalds). (Firmware upgrades such as this are automatically pushed out to the player whenever it connects to a network.) While you listen, you can press a Heart button to identify songs you really like and a Ban button to mark the ones you don’t. The player will upload this information when you connect to the server, and Slacker’s music-discovery algorithms will take them into account while selecting your next batch of songs.

Audio quality is excellent, and the music is free but interspersed with advertisements. The optional paid Slacker Premium service eliminates the ads and the limit on how many songs you can skip per hour. Subscriptions range from $7.50 to $10 per month, depending on the length of your contract. We reviewed the 2GB Slacker Player, which has enough memory to store 15 radio stations and 1,500 songs, with 500MB left over for your own music (in MP3 or WMA format, including WMA Lossless) or, if you’re a subscriber, songs you’ve marked for retention in the player’s library. Slacker also offers 4GB and 8GB models that sell for $250 and $300, respectively.

The Slacker Player is chunky for a flash-based device, but the huge display (4-inch diagonal with 480x272 resolution) makes the size worthwhile. All that screen real estate allows for not only easy-to-read menus but also the display of lots of information, including artist biographies and album reviews sourced from All Music Guide. The screen goes dark after 30 seconds (a battery-conservation decision), which is barely enough time to read all that great material. You can tap a button to reactivate it, but we recommend changing this value to 60 seconds or even indefinite).

The player has two buttons on one side, four on the other (one of which is integrated into a wheel), and two on the top, a configuration that requires two hands to navigate. (And we feel compelled to mention that the On/Off/Lock button feels sloppy and cheap.) You’d think all those buttons would make the Slacker difficult to navigate, but the user interface is easily mastered. The Playlist function, on the other hand, is nearly useless in its current iteration—but for us, the Slacker Player’s big attraction is that we don’t need to make playlists.

UPDATE: This story was edited on April 7, 2008 to reflect a new firmware update that resolved our complaint about how long the display remains active.