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ATTENTION | Noah Brier

Niche Choices are More Meaningful

Because so many fewer people are listening to lesser-known bands, you can gain a whole lot more insight into their tastes from the knowledge.

September 25, 2006 | RSS | EMAIL | PRINT | 10 COMMENTS

Yesterday morning I realized something that had been floating around in my mind for a while: Niche choices provide a whole lot more insight than mass ones.

I was playing with last.fm's similar artist radio. The basic premise is you put in an artist name and it plays you comparable music based on the data they've collected from users. Thing is, the similar artist player spits back terrible results if you put in an artist like Coldplay. That's because for a band that popular, similarities in people's other tastes don't necessarily mean similar sound. The pool is too diluted.

That makes perfect sense logically, but for whatever reason yesterday morning it struck me as incredibly important. When I put in the Guther, the system returned some very accurate similarities as well as some interesting, but good, deviations. That's because for an artist like Guther, who very few people listen to, the other artists people listen to are more meaningful.

None of this is to take anything away from popular bands like Coldplay, I actually like them quite a bit. Instead, it's just to make the point that when a person makes a conscious decision to consume something niche it says much more about their taste than a mass artist/movie/etc.

Let's try it another way: Imagine going into a room and asking everyone who's visited Yahoo! to raise their hand. Everyone in the room would have their arm in the air I assume. Now ask who's visited NoahBrier.com. Pretend one other person raises their hand. (Come on . . . use your imagination here!) The odds that you have something to talk about with that one other person in the room is far higher than you having something to talk about with everyone in the room.

I think this explains two important pieces of this 2.0volution, specifically as it moves outwards towards the general, more diverse, public:

  1. The best recommendations come from niche choices.
  2. In order to compare niche choices effectively you must have scale.

What's scary about that statement, is that it seems like as soon as these things go mass they will no longer be useful. That may be true for something like 'similar artist radio' for Coldplay. However, what a system like last.fm can do to get over that issue is look at your entire library and compare from there. Thus their other feature, 'recommendation radio', is even better. By looking at everything you listen to and comparing it to everything everyone else listens to, you get some pretty insightful picks.

None of this is new, Amazon's been doing it for years with their 'people who bought this bought that,' but it's still a really big deal.

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COMMENTS

1Charles

It's going to be fun to see how this pans out, because it seems as though it'll make finding "preferable" things easier. I wonder if there is a way that time could be considered when the system decides to "recommend" something. For example, say a large majority of people who loved the blues eventually moved on to be interested in jazz. Perhaps the recommending model could take that into consideration, and carefully delay the jazz recommendation until the appropriate time span had transpired...

I suppose that in a way, the same thing is happening when advertisements target a specific age bracket. Generally, older people like This, and younger people like That. I suppose this could be our age in music, only everyone ages in different directions!

September 25, 2006

2nate archer

Not sure if it was you who pointed this out Noah but just like the internet helped exposed the power of social networks, last.fm is exposing the power of recommendations. This isn't a new thing, like social networks it has always been around. The web is making all our offline actions transparent and viewable. When my friend recommends a new band, I take notice because we have similar tastes. On the web, the key to this type of recommendation is building the trust that will make me take notice, otherwise its irrelevant.

PS - I digg Guther, great sound!! You should check out Fujiya & Miyagi's album Transparent Things, also great!

September 25, 2006

3R

There's a paradox at work here:

Making smaller choices says more about you.

I think by analyzing niche consumption behavior marketers can make safer leaps in logic.

Ex. Radiohead fan = higher chance of political activism

Haven't checked out last.fm but a Bay Area company www.pandora.com does something similar. Pandora's recommendations come from actual listeners documenting distinctions/similarities and not from consumption behavior...

September 25, 2006

4Noah Brier

Thanks for the comments (and music recommendations) guys.

One of the other things I think is really interesting about recommendations at the moment is that on the other end is regular people recommended things the old fashioned way is more important then ever. Because people don't trust advertising like they used to, word of mouth has become one of the largest factors in purchase decisions (Max, if you're reading this please correct me if I'm wrong).

September 25, 2006

5mroonie

Exactly! Even products geared towards specific niche communities will thrive with their loyal customers. Companies who try to please all types of people are bound to fail because there is just too many people to please. I think that's why the SMB market has become such a prime audience for targeting.

Great post.

September 25, 2006

6Noah Brier

Thanks mroonie, glad you liked it.

Also, pardon my ignorance, but what is SMB?

September 25, 2006

7mroonie

SMB stands for small/medium businesses

We all learn something new everyday =)

September 25, 2006

8nate archer

small is the new big!

Or maybe it always was?

September 26, 2006

9Jack Cheng

In response to #3,

Listening habits don't influence Pandora as much as the melodies and harmonies of the actual song... it's based off of the Music Genome Project.

But this brings up another issue - even Last.fm and Amazon are at some level dictated by a computer algorithm. Though it may be more accurate at predicting what I like, to me it feels less... authentic. I'd take a mix cd from a friend over Pandora any day.

September 26, 2006

10jeff

Good thing this is out there. Because it should actively eliminate people experiencing things for themselves and actually discovering they DON'T like certain things.

September 27, 2006