music discovery machines

Pitchfork

Take a minute and think about your 10 favorite albums of all time. How did you discover them? Maybe you made an impulse buy at the record store counter, or you found a tape in a rental car. But it's more likely that you heard most of them through your friends, or a glowing review in a magazine, or catching a hit on the radio, or because you were already following the catalog of a producer or label or artist. In other words, you got a recommendation. If you had the time, you could work your way through your record collection and explain how you made each purchase.

So how about predicting what you'll do next? Since the mid-1990s, online music recommendation or music discovery tools have studied our tastes and told us what to buy. And in the past year, several startups have launched with new, more ambitious software that someday may understand us better than we know ourselves.

The idea that a computer could judge music, let alone recommend it, strikes some as repugnant; yet many customers are drawn to the idea of finding records thanks to the Web's promise of perfect information. In the same way that your one true love could be working at a bank in Santa Fe, and the two of you may never meet, there are bands out there that would become your lifetime favorites-- if only someone would hand them to you.

[snip]

Music discovery tools could boost sales industry-wide-- as much as tenfold, depending on who you talk to-- and they're our best and, really, one of our only tools for tackling the marketing phenomenon known as the "Long Tail," where consumers wade through millions of niche and obscure albums thanks to the limitless shelves of online stores. Every day, bedroom musicians give away their Creative Commons-licensed mp3s, and digital distibutors snatch up forgotten back catalogs. San Francisco's IODA inked a deal to digitize 60,000 releases from China; how could any human wade through it all to find the best albums?

But how far can these tools go? Can they create maps of our sensibilities and tell us exactly what we want to hear-- night and day-- for any mood?

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Number of U.S. Inmates Rises 2 Percent

AP

WASHINGTON - Prisons and jails added more than 1,000 inmates each week for a year, putting almost 2.2 million people, or one in every 136 U.S. residents, behind bars by last summer.

The total on June 30, 2005, was 56,428 more than at the same time in 2004, the government reported Sunday. That 2.6 percent increase from mid-2004 to mid-2005 translates into a weekly rise of 1,085 inmates.

Of particular note was the gain of 33,539 inmates in jails, the largest increase since 1997, researcher Allen J. Beck said. That was a 4.7 percent growth rate, compared with a 1.6 percent increase in people held in state and federal prisons.

Prisons accounted for about two-thirds of all inmates, or 1.4 million, while the other third, nearly 750,000, were in local jails, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics.

Beck, the bureau's chief of corrections statistics, said the increase in the number of people in the 3,365 local jails is due partly to their changing role. Jails often hold inmates for state or federal systems, as well as people who have yet to begin serving a sentence.

"The jail population is increasingly unconvicted," Beck said. "Judges are perhaps more reluctant to release people pretrial."

The report by the Justice Department agency found that 62 percent of people in jails have not been convicted, meaning many of them are awaiting trial.

[snip]

The racial makeup of inmates changed little in recent years, Beck said. In the 25-29 age group, an estimated 11.9 percent of black men were in prison or jails, compared with 3.9 percent of Hispanic males and 1.7 percent of white males.

51st Eurovision Song Contest

Finnish monsters rock Eurovision

A Finnish "horror rock" group who dress in monster costumes have pulled off a surprise win at the 51st Eurovision Song Contest in Athens.

European viewers voted for Lordi's song Hard Rock Hallelujah in a show that is normally associated with catchy pop and big ballads.

A late summer tour with GWAR is unconfirmed at press time.