alex.mullr.net/blog

Spent half an hour this evening trying to think on what the deal with iTunes' new Genius feature is… nobody’s totally clear on how it works, so I thought I’d half-heartedly check into whether it works better for people with a more mainstream music taste or not. Here’s the results from me pulling a few dozen random opinions from Twitter and checking them against Last.fm profiles. The x-axis is an arbitrary score I assigned based on how the Tweet sounded, and the y-axis is an “eclectic” score given by some service. I’m also doing something fun with tags, but don’t know where that’s going yet.

As you can see, it’s sort-of kind-of maybe conclusive, but nothing that’s going to wow anyone. The people satisfied with Genius tend to have a less eclectic score (more mainstream taste), if that makes sense.

If you want lend me a hand, and can be bothered, give iTunes Genius an overall “satisfaction score” of between 0 and 1. I’ll compare it against your Last.fm music profile (and please leave a link if I don’t know where to find it). This should really be automated, but I don’t have the time, motivation or know how to put it together right now. Cheers!

I’ll post something more substantial when I have something more substantial to work off. Shockingly.