Erstellt am: 17. 1. 2014 - 11:00 Uhr
Today's Webtip: Music Timeline
I should probably know better by now, but I keep hoping that all of the information the various online surfaces are sucking up might some day be put to good use. Or, rather, that some of the things they are finding out might some day be made public. It seems unfair that so much potential information is only being used to sell advertising and the millitary industrial complex.
We were almost there with things like Pandora and Last.fm. But then the major labels got involved and locked that it all down. Spotify and Deezer must be gathering similar information on users tastes and musical relationships, but you wouldn't know it by listening to the resutls of their radio algorithms.
And now there is Google. They don't just know what members of their music service are listening to and buying, they also know what they have in their collections, AND they have access to all of the other stuff they have decided to track this month.
That is a lot of information.
And now they are sharing some of the insights they have gained from it. Sort of.
That is the music timline. It's trying to represent the popularity of various music genres as a function of time. It's one of the first public results of a music intelligence project that they are running. Yes, they seem to be using it to sell stuff, but that seems to be something you can't avoid these days. It' still worth playing around with, and you might just find something interesting.
Besides, I think it's worth it to support potentially useful implementations of Big Data. Why should only the spooks and marketroids have all the fun?