What's Up with Amazon's Music Recommendations?!

So I'm just diving into Amazon's new MP3 offering and I came across something strange. When I am at their regular CD store I get different music recommendations than I get at their new Amazon MP3 beta. Supposedly, they are both based on "items I own" (or more specifically, have purchased from Amazon). But, if that were the case shouldn't they be recommending the same things?


Amazon Music Recommendations:
* Lots of Fiona Apple and Peter Gabriel - not really representative of what I like

Amazon MP3 Recommendations:
* Arcade Fire, Ryan Adams, Neutral Milk Hotel, The Hold Steady - these are on the money (although I already own all of the things they are recommending)


These are apparently being calculated off of different data? Why the huge discrepancy?

UPDATE:
Someone suggested that this may be due to the fact that the MP3 library is a subset of their CD inventory and therefore so are the MP3 Recommendations. That was my only real theory as well. I'm not sure what labels Peter Gabriel and Fiona are on, but I can look.

But, what I'm actually more surprised by are the good MP3 recommendations. I haven't bought a CD from Amazon in ages yet they seemed to have some insight into my current listening behavior - it's almost like they are scraping data from some of my social networks, taste APIs (like MyStrands or Last.fm), pulling library info off of my machine, or some how getting more current data of my behavior. Amazon shouldn't know that much about my listening habits, and I highly doubt they could gather such information based on my last purchases of computer accessories and baby toys.


UPDATE #2:
Another suggestion was that the MP3 recommendations were being based on my page viewing history on Amazon. The pages I've viewed at Amazon are only for TVs, ink jet cartridges and toys - I don't browse music there. But, I wonder if any of the album artwork fetchers I use (that pull from Amazon) end up inadvertently sharing my library data back with them (does it appear like I have "viewed" those pages?). If that was true and it didn't have any MP3 purchase behavior to base my MP3 recommendations (and only page views), that could explain it....

iPhone to Support Streaming Radio?

I came across this story the other day....

iPhoneology : Blog Archive : iPhone Firmware Hints at New Apps, Widgets: "The most exciting of these seems to be the mobile.radio, as it suggests the possibility that Apple may be looking forward to supporting streaming radio or hopefully, an FM tuner on the device."

There is some speculation that this means the iPhone may at some point include an FM receiver - I think that the highly more likely scenario is support for streaming radio over EDGE/WiFi. Considering that the Radio stations that show up in iTunes are really just a selection of SHOUTcast stations, I doubt that Apple is looking to create their own radio programming - but instead just looking to bring a streaming experience to their iPhone consumers.

What would be really interesting is streaming radio support in conjunction with over-the-air downloads. As you are listening/switching stations, your iPhone is tracking what you have listened to, thus giving you the opportunity to click "buy" on any track that you have heard and/or highly rated. The could then download the track directly to the iPhone (and simultaneously make it available in iTunes when you get back to your computer.

If I bought a la carte tracks, I would think that was pretty cool. Cooler yet would be the ability to cache a streaming station to the iPhones hard drive.... RadioTivo, but I find it highly dubious that Apple would ever enable a use case like this that could cannibalize their sales.

Musicane

I just started to dig into Musicane, which is basically a platform for independent artists to embed and sell their content directly from their sites (or others via a viral embeddable player widget).

For those of you that know me for a long time, you may remember my brief foray into the label side of the business with Prodigal Sun Records - which I started in 1994 and ran while I was in grad. school. Well, my one an only artist - Biohio - is long gone (although you can still find the guys kicking around in bands like Emmet Swimming, Quitter UK and The Device.), but I used their debut album as my guinea pig. Check it out below...