Tom Conrad: Savage Beast: Music Recommendation In a previous post I mentioned Tom Conrad and his company Savage Beast. I met Tom at a Scoble Dinner a while back and was very excited to hear about his company as I am a huge digital music fan.
Tom takes the time to do a brief write up on what Savage Beast does and it sounds very interesting. The basic idea seems to revolve around recommendation technology and something called the Music Genome Project — a detailed analysis of a century of popular music.
Music analysts listen to music and then each song is analyzed along 400 distinct musical attributes to create a complete musical analysis. This analysis is then used to find other music that an individual might also like.
Now to date I have not been a big fan of recommendation technology… yet. Although some find the recomendation technology in TiVo compelling I have found very little new programming interests through TiVo’s suggestions.
I do wonder though what would happen if I could submit my 7,000 or so 5 star rated songs into a digital black box. I wonder if there would be a way to prioritize the much larger portion of my music library that is still as of yet unrated. If by analyzing my current 5 star ratings, Savage Beast could suggest to me an order to sample my remaining music in for rating purposes this would be interesting to me.
At present the company seems to be more focused on a b2b strategy than a direct service for the end consumer. I wonder though if they couldn’t develop a website whereby an individual could say type in 30 of their favorite songs and get back a suggestion list of additional music. They could then provide samples, link the recommended songs to pay sites or to places to buy CDs, and possibly share in some of the revenue.
If the technology was good I would think that something like this could really spread by word of mouth.