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What music will I like?

Issues

The next step to discovering music you will like is to find music that is both good and in your range of musical interest. The key to recommending music is personalization, which entails taking into account any trends in the user's preferences. Recommendations must be simple and accessible enough so that the user can easily understand what music he/she will most likely enjoy; however, the goal is to make any recommendations as specifically catered to the user as possible. Another issue in music recommendation is the question of who knows music best - should the user believe the word of a few established music critics, the word (implicit or explicit) of the mob of music listeners everywhere, or the critique of a complex computer program which analyzes music's inherent audio patterns. I believe that no one method is necessarily better, and that the user should listen to the opinions that are most likely to match yours, and the importance of a recommendation should be based on the level of correlation between the user's taste and the critic's taste.

Methods

The essence of music recommendation lies in listener reviews, which take on a variety of implementation and formats. Reviews can be either explicit or implicit, be written by anyone with any background of knowledge, and can contain as little as a number or letter grade or as much as a multi-page article. To find music that is within your range of musical interest, it is important to both examine music that is similar to that which you like, as well as listeners who are similar in taste to you. Thus, similar music networks are critical to understanding the relationship(s) between music and determining artistic similarities. On the other hand, similar listener networks are valuable for understanding the relationship between music and user, determining similarities in listening, and allowing listeners to interact with similar listeners to share music artists and thoughts. However, the future of discovering music you will like seems to lie in audio analysis, which is a dissection, interpretation, and analysis of the actual waves of audio of a given fundamental unit of music.

Services

Reviews

• LAUNCHcast, AllMusic, Metacritic, RateYourMusic|

Similar Music Networks

• Last.fm, LAUNCHcast, Musicmatch Jukebox, MusicStrands, Audiobaba, The Echo Nest|

**Audio Analysis

• Pandora, Audiobaba, The Echo Nest|