The Evolution Of Music Discovery In The Cloud
There is now some real competition in the cloud services marketplace, and while good value, ease of use, beauty of the interface and breadth of the catalog are all important factors in winning over users, a powerful discovery tool is at the heart of retaining them. The approaches taken by four companies in developing effective methods for discovering new music are assessed: how do social music recommendations stack up against algorithms, deep metadata gathering and data mining? What are the consumer's expectations? And is there anything acts can do to improve their visibility and "recommendability"? Gain some insights into the evolution of this exciting and fast-expanding sector.
Presenters
Andrea works as Content Operations Manager at social music gaming start-up MXP4. He also hosts the podcast Digital Music Trends that he started in April 2009; a show complemented by a blog completely dedicated to digital music technology companies (www.digitalmusictrends.com).
Andrea graduated from Salford University with a BA in Popular Music and Recording Techniques and an MA in Composition and spent four years working for Universal Music in London.
T. Jay is a huge music fan with a huge music collection that spans back to his days working at record stores, writing reviews, and seeing shows. His mom, while responsible for the start of his life, was not responsible for his taste in music (she liked Richard Clayderman and Frank Mills), though his dad did have a big influence. His desert island picks range from Pinback and Radiohead to Harry Nilsson and Echo & the Bunnymen. His new media life started at suck.com where he was the resident butt of jokes, and most recently he led teams at Yahoo! News and has been running MOG's Product and Engineering Teams for four years. He spends his days creating specs, drawing wireframes, roasting coffee, painting and coming up with new ideas.
Paul is the Director of Developer Platform at The Echo Nest, a research-oriented music intelligence company located in Boston MA. Paul is interested in using data about music to help people discover and organize their music. Paul is particularly interested in how we can use data visualization to explore the complex world of music.
Music Technology entrepenurs and evangelist.
Gracenote is a SONY company but we work with everyone in music business.
Matthew Hawn is Last.fm's VP of Product and Marketing, setting the roadmap for the global music service.
He has been working professionally in digital media for more than 17 years, starting as a journalist in San Francisco in the early 90s for Macworld Magazine, MSNBC, Entertainment Weekly. In 1998, he moved over to the music industry working for Universal Music Group and Universal Music Group in international roles from New York and London as they built out their digital product marketing and distribution strategy. Since 1996, he's been based in London.
You can track his taste in music here: http://www.last.fm/user/jukevox
and follow him on Twitter here: @jukevox
Thursday, March 15
