1000 years of music to listen to

Youngmoo Kim had asked everyone on the ISMIR recommendation panel to briefly summarize what they think will happen in the next 5 years of music recommendation. However, it's really hard to do so in less than 4 minutes.

From my perspective the most interesting development in the next 5 years will be the increase in the amount of data we will be working with. We will have a lot more of the same and we will have additional sources. Combining different sources is an interesting challenge, but the main challenge will be to scale things up.

All of this additional information will lead to much better recommendations overall, and in particular in the long tail. We'll be able to detect new trends such as an up-and-coming artists or the emergence of a new subgenre much sooner. We'll be able to localize recommendations a lot more.

At the same time there'll obviously be a lot more music to choose from. I'd roughly estimate about 200 million tracks in Last.fm's recommendation engine in the next 5 years. That's more than 1000 years of continuous listening. Subcultures and genres will emerge faster.

In 5 years recommendation engines will have a much better understanding of listeners. While Last.fm, Pandora, and others already do a lot to understand what listeners are interested in, I'm sure there is room for a lot more improvements.

Another interesting development I'm looking forward to is data portability and openness. In particular, I'm looking forward to users being able to move freely with their personal data from one site to another. Similar to how Last.fm users can already today allow other sites to access their data.

I'm also expecting to see a lot more artists and labels embrace recommendation engines. Similar to SEO (search engine optimization) more artist and labels will try to do a lot more REO (recommendation engine optimization).

Obviously mobile applications will be very important, and so will mobile music recommendations. And I have no doubts that human-to-human recommendations (which are strongly supported by Last.fm) will continue to be very important, maybe even more than they are today.

Anthony Volodkin made a great point that we'll see a lot happen in terms of user interfaces, how recommendations are represented, how recommendations are explained. I believe Paul Lamere would call that steerable and transparent recommendations. I like how Last.fm explains recommendations by explaining a recommendation in terms of a bunch of similar artists I'm familiar with. However, there's obviously room for a lot more. On the other side, I wouldn't mind no explanation at all, as long as every recommendation is spot on. Anthony also made a great point by pointing to playful discovery systems.

I believe it was Brian Whitman who said that recommendations will be a commodity. Every music site will have recommendations. Just like almost every web 2.0 site out there supports tagging. I believe Etienne Handman made a similar point when he previously explained to me why he expects the word "personalization" to fade away. Everything will be personalized, it will be the default option.

ISMIR Thoughts

Inspired by Paul's constant flow of ISMIR blog posts I thought I should give it a try and post some thoughts as well.

First of all, the organizers did a wonderful job organizing ISMIR. I already wrote about what I think about the electronic proceedings. I was also very happy to see that they did not waste unnecessary resources and skipped the silly conference bag thing.

I very much enjoyed giving the social tags tutorial with Paul. It worked out really well, and although I knew Paul's slides since weeks, I found it fascinating to listen to Paul talk about them.

So far ISMIR has by far exceeded my expectations. I've had the pleasure to meet many in person that I previously hadn't had the opportunity to meet. I've also had the pleasure to see many very interesting posters. Unfortunately I've also managed to miss many that I wanted to see. I guess there's never enough time to see everything.

Last night's banquet was great too. In particular I enjoyed the conversations with Etienne from Pandora.

The recommendation panel today was fun, too.

ISMIR 2008 Tutorial: Social Tags and Music Information Retrieval

When Paul originally asked me if I'd be interested in helping him put together a tutorial proposal for ISMIR I was a bit reluctant. I did an ISMIR tutorial a long time ago, and I didn't forget how much work it was (although it was only a one hour mini tutorial). In fact, only last year Paul and Oscar told me how much work it was to put together their recommendation tutorial (which I liked a lot).

Anyway, somehow I couldn't say no and looking back I don't regret it at all. I'm totally fascinated by social tags. There's no tutorial topic I'd rather talk about. Working together with Paul has been a great pleasure, and I've learned a lot. However, I'm very much looking forward to have a free weekend or even just a free evening again. (Free as in not-MIR-related.)

Paul and I have put together about 200 slides for our tutorial. I think we still need to figure out our time budget. Hopefully we'll have plenty of time for interesting discussions.

Btw, as part of the tutorial we started compiling a list of relevant papers. That list started to grow. Then we thought it would be a good idea to group papers into topics (e.g. autotagging). Then we realized that several papers were in several categories... which is when we moved everything to delicious. In particular, we started using the tag "SocialMusicResearch" to mark interesting things we found in the Internet. Here's a list of some of the items we have tagged. We hope that others will start using that tag as well.

Btw, if you are going to ISMIR, please say hi! If you don't know what I look like: try to spot the guy wearing a Last.fm t-shirt.

ISMIR Proceedings 2008! Wow!

I'm extremely impressed. The ISMIR proceedings are online. Whoever wants a printed copy can organize it themselves (it couldn't be much easier). Some might also want to only print the papers they are interested in. And some might be happy to have only an electronic version.

It's always been a pain to drag the heavy ISMIR proceedings home. And it always felt like a huge waste of paper.

I heard Juan and Youngmoo talk about this idea a year ago in Vienna (at last year's ISMIR). I'm very happy to see that they found a solution that should make everyone happy.

Juan writes in his email:
We hope that you will like this new approach to printing the proceedings which we intend to be more cost effective, more convenient, and, with luck, more environmentally friendly than mass printing of proceedings for all attendees who may not wish to carry a printed copy around.

Wonderful! :-)

Librarians and Tags

Yves pointed me to this really nice presentation by a librarian who seems to have a really good understanding of tagging. The only part missing in that presentation is music.

Libraries and the Hive Mind: Folksonomies and Tagging

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: tagging tags)

Getting Last.fm Tags for MP3s with Python

Paul (who is already distributing a large chunk of Last.fm tags) and I are planing to include a few slides in our ISMIR tutorial on how to obtain tag data.

Below is some Python code that basically takes an MP3 file as input and outputs a list of Last.fm tags (for both artist and track). The MP3s don't need correct ID3 tags, but they need to be full length (clips won't work).

The Python code uses Norman's command line finger printing client to find the correct artist and track name. The path to the executable needs to be set in the code. Norman supports Win32, OSX Intel, Linux - 32.

The output is written to a file. For each MP3 file passed as argument there are up to two rows in the output file: one for the artist tags, and one for the track tags. Each row has the format: "<mp3filename> <encoded artist or artist/track name> <tag> <score> [<tag> <score> ...]". Tabs are used as delimiters.

The data from the Last.fm API is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike License.

Btw, special thanks to Eric Casteleijn for various Python recommendations (lxml etc). (Which reminds me that I still need to fix the other Python code I posted.) As usual any feedback is much appreciated.

import subprocess, sys, re, time, urllib
from lxml import etree

FP_CLIENT_PATH = '"C:\\fpclient\\lastfmfpclient.exe"'
MAX_RETRIES_URL_OPEN = 5

def getArtistTrack(mp3FileName): # ret: (artist, track)
    command = FP_CLIENT_PATH + ' ' + mp3FileName
    pipe = subprocess.Popen(command, \
                            stdout=subprocess.PIPE).stdout
    for line in pipe:
        mo = re.search('<url>.*/([^/]+)/_/(.+)<',line)
        if mo:
            return urllib.quote(mo.group(1)), \
                   urllib.quote(mo.group(2))
    print "ERROR: failed to get artist/track for: " + \
          mp3FileName

def crawlTags(url): # ret: [(tag, count), ...]
    for i in xrange(MAX_RETRIES_URL_OPEN):
        tagCounts = []
        time.sleep(1) # be nice!
        try:
            root = etree.parse(
                urllib.urlopen(url)).getroot()
        except IOError:
            print "(%d/%d) Failed trying to get: %s." % \
                (i, MAX_RETRIES_URL_OPEN, url)
        else:
            for tag in root.iter('tag'):
                tagCounts.append(
                    (tag.find('name').text, \
                     tag.find('count').text))
            return tagCounts

def tags(prefix, items, outStream): # crawl and write
    for mp3FileName, item in items:
        url = prefix + item + '/toptags.xml'
        print url
        tagCounts = crawlTags(url)
        outStream.write('%s\t%s\t%s\n' %
                (mp3FileName, item, '\t'.join(
                    tag + '\t' + str(count)
                    for tag, count in tagCounts)))    

def main():
    if len(sys.argv)<3:
        print 'USAGE: python getTags.py ' + \
              '<outFile> <f1.mp3> [<f2.mp3> ...]'
        sys.exit(2)
    outFile = sys.argv[1]
    mp3FileNames = sys.argv[2:]
    artists = set()
    artistTracks = set()
    for mp3FileName in mp3FileNames:
        print 'Fingerprinting: ' + mp3FileName
        artist,track = getArtistTrack(mp3FileName)
        artists.add((mp3FileName, artist))
        artistTracks.add((mp3FileName,
                          artist + '/' + track))

    print 'start crawling tags'
    o = open(outFile,'w');
    tags('http://ws.audioscrobbler.com/1.0/artist/', \
         artists, o)
    tags('http://ws.audioscrobbler.com/1.0/track/', \
         artistTracks, o)    
    o.close()    

if __name__ == "__main__":
    main()

Tagging Critics

I was doing some research for the ISMIR tag tutorial when I stumbled upon (via this interesting paper Playing Tag: An Analysis of Vocabulary Patterns and Relationships Within a Popular Music Folksonomy by Abbey E. Thompson):

The following expert from this paper:

[...] "tags are often ambiguous, overly personalised and inexact" [...] "The result is an uncontrolled and chaotic set of tagging terms that do not support searching as effectively as more controlled vocabularies do." [...]

This was published in the D-Lib magazine in early 2006. I wouldn't be surprised if by now the authors realized they were wrong.

But why would anyone ever want to control the vocabulary people use when describing something so extremely multifaceted and something that evolves so fast like the content on the web (delicious), or snapshots of life (flickr), or music (Last.fm)? I guess I'd need to think more like an old-skool librarian to understand that.