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Karla Starr at the Seattle Weekly writes another thoughtful piece on music discovery. This time the subject is not too little music to choose from, but too much. She quotes a Google executive who observes that in seven years, every song ever recorded will fit in our collective pocket.

The problem is that with this much choice, we don’t bond to any of those songs - we’re too busy skipping around, wanting to sample the next song, or being overwhelmed with choice such that whatever we do finally choose doesn’t satisfy us. Springsteen said something along these same lines: “57 Channels (and nothin’ on)”. Except now make that 1000 channels and counting. With this sort of abundance, music seems to lose some of its value. I remember when DJs chose music for us: yes, those were the bad old days, but when that one song came on that you’d been waiting for all day, the world was right again. We even called the DJ, asking him to play that one special song.

We’ve heard this theme before, when considering why people aren’t happier than they think they should be. It comes down to too many choices. You make a choice, but can’t help wondering whether some other choice would have been better.

Maybe Ford was onto something when he declared: You can have any color you want - as long as it’s black. And if Pandora really wants to help us discover and bond with new music, maybe it should remove the “Skip” button?

Thanks to Paul Lamere for the pointer.

[tags]music discovery[/tags]

Oscar Celma and Paul Lamere have put together a worthwhile set of slides on the art and science of music recommendation. The slides speak to two important themes as it relates to music in our lives: how to find new music for your own listening enjoyment, and how “Music 2.0″ commercial plays can help you find the same.

These slides are full of fascinating data and observations, but close with perhaps its most compelling: music discovery is in its pre-Google stage. Much work remains to be done, and, like Google’s ascendance, some winner is waiting to take a huge slice of this business.

[tags]music recommendation,music similarity[/tags]