By Foster Kamer 11/07/11 4:16pm

LEAKS

charm

Drizzy Drake’s Mastery of Internet Album-Leak Diplomacy

So: a music artist–say, the most famous half-Jewish, half-black, all-Canadian former DeGrassi star (who also happens to be really, really good friends with Lil’ Wayne) in the universe—spends all kinds of time working on the follow-up to his major label debut, which was widely perceived to be an ambitious-yet-rushed effort to capitalize on his quickly rising fame. Fans eagerly await the new album as singles trickle out and release dates get pushed back. Finally, after months of hot-and-heavy press anticipation, the album is unleashed onto the public…via a leaked copy on the internet, over a week ahead of time. Read More

By Ben Popper 5/18/11 3:23pm

Music Moguls

brain

Forget Pandora – Brooklyn’s Clio Uses Machine Learning To Recommend Music

The Music Genome Project conceived by Pandora is the foundation for one of the most successful streaming radio apps of all time. But any serious audiophile who spends more than few days on the service quickly begins to notice the same tracks and artists repeating.

Part of the reason the catalog feels shallow is because its expensive to license new tracks. But another reason is that the Music Genome relies on human experts to evaluate each track, an extremely time consuming process. It’s why Pandora has less than 1,000,000 songs while competitors like Rhapsody have ten times that.

The team behind Clio, a new service for analyzing music, is taking the exact opposite approach. Read More