The Artists' Artists Network - A Thought Project in Homebrew

jeff harrington · Joined: Nov 08, 2003 Posts: 84 Location: Brooklyn

An idea I've been toying with for a while...

http://beepsnort.org/archives/000119.html

Twisted Evil

elektro80 · Posted: Sat Feb 07, 2004 7:34 pm Post subject:

Not a bad idea at all. On the other hand I have some problems with popularity meters. If you remember the old MP3.com boards and then drop by funender.com ( put on those sociologist glasses ) you will probably see the main problem here.. artists themselves are working the charts and the meters. This is OK.. I have no problem with that .. but the actual value of the meters and the charts are probably nil.

A crosslink stalker is of course something else. One possible scenario is that each artist enters his own base url into a database.. then a sitespider walks thru the lot and spots crosslinks between sites and files. Then.. using metainfo queries, a sillybot will suggest files and artists which might fit your profile or interest.

On the other hand... aren´t they educating those curators and music journalists to do this work anyway? Why should we care?

Genres like electronic chamber music, symbolic realism, primed parallells, retrograde semiotics and bebop-o-tronics will not be discovered unless we die. There is a rule concerning this. At least there seems to to be rule about this. They even killed serialism in the 80s. Someone should teach the Universe a lesson.

mosc · Posted: Sat Feb 07, 2004 10:48 pm Post subject:

I guess there is another thread about this. I haven't had a chance to look through all the related links, but member play lists would be a great thing to have here on this site. The nice thing is the music would be more focused on the kind of things interesting to our members. It probably wouldn't be too difficult to write an app for the site. Does anyone know of any open source software that might do the trick.

The great thing would be that we wouldn't have to host all the tracks, and the bandwidth requirements are nill because the mp3s are on other servers. The bad things it the playlists would get out of date as time goes by.l

elektro80 · Posted: Sun Feb 08, 2004 5:28 am Post subject:

I just thought of something... iTunes has a "plugin" format. Dunno if it works on the PC. But there are ( on the mac ) lotsa scripts for exporting various playlists to html on the web in various formats. iTunes lists internet streams as songs too, so I guess a playlists containing "external assets will export to html too. Some of the scripts work as timed batch tasks and will export your most played tracks or whatever. The scripts also uploads the parsed html document to a webserver.

jeff harrington · Joined: Nov 08, 2003 Posts: 84 Location: Brooklyn

It's even easier, with WinAmp to save Playlists.

This Webjay system, made it a 10 minute job to make a playlist from the front page of ElectronicScene I just visited the page to be scraped and then hit this URI:

javascript:location.href='http://webjay.org/bookmarklet?url='+escape(location.href)

It sends the previous page to the scraper. You need to make a Playlist first and then select it for scraping 'into.' I did this for jeffharrington.org also.

So, playlist creation is simple.

Aggregating interesting playlists here would be very cool, Howard! I'm thinking of doing it at NetNewMusic also.

Shocked

mosc · Posted: Sun Feb 08, 2004 8:13 am Post subject:

Yes, it's easy to create a play list in Winamp, but playlists per se are only a baby step. There should be annotation, were the name of the artist, title, and some text about the piece.

A scraper is pretty much just redundant. Why not go directly to the source page.

I'm thinking of something more than just a list - more of a resource. The person making the list brings value, more that just identifying the tracks, but organizaning and explaining them.

Ideally, such a thing should be linked in with the store, so people can make lists of mp3s that are dowloadable for a small cost, like iTunes, but where the artist gets a big percentage.

elektro80 · Posted: Sun Feb 08, 2004 8:28 am Post subject:

The metainformation is the clue to making this a resource. The iTunes scripts can export all the metainfo contained in the mp3 files ( and I have seen modules for Canto Cumulus and other asset management systems which can pretty much do the same and also handle transactions). I guess a manual data entry interface might be best anyway.

The system proposed by Howard and Jeff could very well also function as CDDB for electronic music too if tags for CDs are added. That way both offline and online content can have metainfo. The fastest RAD for a working web application is Filemaker ( http://www.filemaker.com ).

Howard, what you just suggested is really an iTunes Musicshop with extinsive metainfo tags and links to both "free" and "pay-and-listen" files?

mosc · Posted: Sun Feb 08, 2004 8:51 am Post subject:

mosc · Posted: Sun Feb 08, 2004 8:59 am Post subject:

Filemaker.com looks interesting, but it's too pricey for me. I'd think this should be integrated with the forum. Why have a playlist if you can't post comments and other reactions. Not sure how all this would go together.

AgentA · Posted: Mon Feb 09, 2004 3:20 am Post subject:

mosc · Posted: Mon Feb 09, 2004 8:38 am Post subject:

That's right, you've done it with HEADTONES RADIO. I'm listening to it now.

Do you host all of the mp3s, or do you point to everything offsite?

AgentA · Posted: Tue Feb 10, 2004 12:23 am Post subject:

mosc · Posted: Tue Feb 10, 2004 8:47 am Post subject:

Yes, go ahead an start another thread.

Also, I just checked the link to Headtones Radio on our links section. I wanted to make sure there was one there. There was, but there was an error in the URL. I fixed it.

Michael Chocholak · Posted: Wed Feb 11, 2004 12:14 am Post subject:

Popularity polling doesn't do much for me. Usually it tends to reinforce a certain status quo and can make it that much more difficult for new artists to get attention. A lot like the 'I can't get a job because I don't have any experience, and I can't get any experience because I can't get a job' kind of loop.

And it often doesn't work for the music I usually look for. When I used to search the charts at mp3.com, I eventually learned to start out at page ten or whatever because it was mostly 'popular' chaff up to that point. The tasty stuff was buried in the back.

The idea of running playlists could be interesting. I wouldn't see much point in artists running playlists of themselves. Besides most hosting sites offer the option of playing all the tracks as a playlist already so that would be a bit redundant - why not just go to the hosting site & listen. My other concern is that if an artist ran all their tracks off site through deeplinks, the hosting site would undoubtedly get pissed off - they're very clear about not appreciating that kind of thing - and that might adversely affect host sites being as open as they are about deeplinking.

But if we're talking about compilations of a number of artists - that could be a good time. I've always loved putting comps together. Afterall, that's why I like radio, web or otherwise.

jeff harrington · Joined: Nov 08, 2003 Posts: 84 Location: Brooklyn

Argh! Think people! Wink

This isn't popularity polling... this is networked graphing of the likes of artists YOU like. So you like John Zornpy... omg he likes so and so and so do this other guy. Better check him out.

It's about easily walking the "Artists I like" networks, not looking for popular artists and if two artists you like like her then run and check him out!

Cool

Because we're all focussed on interesting artists, the artists we like will likely like interesting artists too.

mosc · Posted: Wed Feb 11, 2004 6:39 am Post subject:

OK, Jeff, I sense frustration, but I think I get it now.

It seems like a great idea to me, though not necessarily playlist related, because some artists don't have online music. It seems like this web walker would be easy to do if all the artists in question were members of something like mp3.com where the data was accessible, but how would you do this on the web in general? What you propose is worthwhile but very challenging data mining project. No?

It would even be difficult if we wanted to add to the user profile on this site a field for favorite artists. If the names were free text, it might be difficult to identify different ways of identifying the artists (so as to build the graph). Maybe that would be workable though.

This is an interesting idea. Too bad I don't work at Bell Labs anymore. I'm sure someone there would have liked to work on such a project.

That said, once you get past the "famous" artists, I would be reluctant to want to identify in a data base which artists were my favorites. It's sorta counter to my concept of community. If a program like you suggest could mine that information by looking at all of my posts and links, maybe scanning my web site, then that's different.

egw · Posted: Wed Feb 11, 2004 6:41 am Post subject:

Yes, correlation analysis to help find something similar to what you like is very useful. I remember a site that did this for movies (maybe they're still around). You would rate movies, then it generated a list of movies you would probably like.
But the popularity polling issues may still be valid. i.e. how do you prevent artists from scamming the algorithms to maximize their own returns.

jeff harrington · Joined: Nov 08, 2003 Posts: 84 Location: Brooklyn

lucas_gonze · Joined: Mar 09, 2004 Posts: 1

mosc · Posted: Tue Mar 09, 2004 8:27 pm Post subject:

Thanks for chiming in and explaining what you have done. Welcome to our forum.

This thread isn't dead, just dormant for a while.

Seems like you've put a great deal of thought into your project. I'm going to have to check back and take some time to better understand it. I'm very busy at the moment with many things, but this is interesting to me and I'll get to it. Thanks again.

If things work correctly, you should get an email when this thread is active.