Reply Channels

Every once in a while, when I'm in a music rut and being lazy, I will just ask people for recommendations on what I should be listening to. Yeah, everybody does that, I know. But want I find interesting is the different modes in which the recommendations come in.

Take today for example... I tweeted (or is "twittered"?) the following:

Need some new music... what do you guys suggest?

Because of the multiple status broadcast and aggregation tools I use, that message found it's way to my Twitter account, Pownce account, Facebook status, FriendFeed (and other lifestreaming sites), and a number of other channels.

What I found interesting where the multiple modes of response I received.

• public @replies via Twitter
• direct Twitter replies
• posts to my Facebook wall
• private (inbox) messages via Facebook
• messages from friends with links sent from their music site of choice
• comments on a number of lifestream aggregators (to where my tweets get published)
• instant messages
• emails
• and I'm guessing that I get some more recommendations from people via comments on this post

I find it to be a very interesting (and growing) phenomenon. What do you guys think? What's your preferred channel?

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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....

Twitter DJ by Foxytunes

Things have been a little hectic lately, and after read Fred Wilson's post on Twitter DJ the other day, I realized that I had forgotten to say anything about it myself.

Twitter DJ leverages Twitter as a human-powered recommendation channel. It was built by the guys at Foxytunes (which btw is a very slick little browser extension) and I was asked to be one of their “featured DJs”.

In their own words...

FoxyTunes Twitter DJ is a Twitter channel with music recommendations from a selected group of "FoxyTunes DJs".

Also, it allows all Twitter users to share their favorite songs with the community.

How do I post songs?

1. Add FoxyTunesDJ as your Twitter friend
2. Wait for a few moments until FoxyTunesDJ adds you back as a friend
3. Use TwittyTunes to post music to Twitter, prefixing it with "@FoxyTunesDJ". All music twits will appear right here on this page (http://www.foxytunes.com/twitterdj) - as well as showing up in each contributors Twitter status

Featured DJs:

Chris Messina

Fred Wilson

Jason Herskowitz

Ouriel Ohayon

Basically, when you click receive the Twitter message, they provide an URL for artists that resolve to their “FoxyTunes Planet” mashup (which pulls in YouTube, Pandora, Last.fm, Flickr and lots of other feeds). Also, when you visit either my DJ channel (or the aggregated channel), you can then listen to the songs I've recommended since they map them to YouTube videos. Voila... personalized radio that doesn't cost them anything to broadcast.

If this takes off for them it will generate a good number of page views for them without actually having to generate any content themselves. There is a growing trend of Music 2.0 services using freely available/licensed music videos to create "personalized radio stations". I'm not sure how this trend ultimately gets reconciled with the Streaming Radio Royalty Rates, but obviously more and more loopholes and workarounds pop-up everyday.