Okay, Pandora might need improvement too…
It would appear that Gordon has noticed my entry on why Pandora is better than last.fm. Apparently he’s been thinking about the whole expert taxonomy question too, in the context of how it relates to TRIM, a document management system.
After I wrote the previous entry, I decided to put Pandora on. I did note that it didn’t do so well with certain artists. What I failed to realise was that it actually does pretty badly with anything that involves singing. It’s great on the instrumental stuff — it can really get into the “right mood”, and play a bunch of similar (but not exactly the same) tunes. But for some reason it totally sucks at suggesting music you might like — if that music involves singing.
And I think it’s because of this: the experts who decided on the taxonomy spent far more time thinking about the music and how they’d categorize that than they did about singing. (Or at least it seems that way.) Which just goes to show you how expert taxonomies might not work all the time. Or at least that there isn’t just one taxonomy that should be developed — most things can be classified in an alarming number of ways (of which a subset may actually be useful).
I tried to think about what it was that I didn’t like about what it was suggesting; but the interesting thing was that I couldn’t describe why I liked the things I did! I think it might have more to do with the “scene” that music was written as a part of; what the influences were on the artists, and possibly even what country they were from.
So I think the ultimate Pandora/last.fm style site might actually take a biographical tree of musical artists — with as much information as possible about the years they were popular, where they were popular and what their influences. Then it would combine that with the excellent work done by the Musical Genome Project, and possibly even chuck in some last.fm style statistical analysis. That would be cool. (Note that the “social” input into this solution would still be fairly minimal.)