Apple’s Genius the first ever playlist generator with a brain of its own
Apple on Tuesday launched an upgraded iTunes that features an intelligent, automatic playlist generator called Genius. This new technology will make a calculated guess from different data that includes the listening habits of iTunes users. James McQuivey, vice president of media research said “This is critical. Too many people fill up their iPods and iTunes libraries with music and then run out of things to listen to because the process of creating useful playlists is painful and broken. By fixing that, Apple ensures that iPods will be listened to more often, and that iTunes will continue to be the dominant music management application,”
He further explained that “It goes like this: Genius builds a playlist based on some songs you choose. Then Genius slips in a few songs you don’t own — I don’t expect them to do this soon, but if they can talk the music industry into it, it will be a huge hit. You get to listen to the song once or twice, as a promotion. A short announcement says, ‘We thought you’d like this song. If you do, click here to buy it at iTunes,’ and boom, you’ve bought a track you know you will like,”
If Genius is real genius and works as Steve Jobs advertised, it is going to dominate the music market for years to come. Genius recommends and generates playlists by collecting data from more than 65 million iTunes users.
iMeem and Pandora have been generating playlists and recommending music for a while but Apple’s user base dwarfs them, the iTunes service is likely to have a advantage.
Microsoft’s update to the Zune also deals with music discovery but as it is tied to a subscription service Zune can recommend and add songs that a user doesn’t already have.
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Yeah Imeem is quite fine! It’s part of the websites which contributed to the revolution in the musical world. However, my favourite one in that context is http://www.deezer.com/en which brought real free and legal music-on-demand! It’s quite great, and it has quite a huge catalogue right now! Check it out.
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