<p>eMusic Tries Out A New Recommendation Engine; Redesigns Homepage45 Commentsby Erick Schonfeldon December 8, 2008Indie music download subscription serviceeMusic and audio books is getting an overhaul. Individual artist an dalbum pages already have more of an AJaxy feel and incorporate YouTube videos and Flickr photos. On Friday, its homepage switched over to a new design centered around a new recommendation engine powered byMediaUnbound. Now, when you sign in as a member, you are presented with a grid of Music and audio books Youll Love made up of personalized recommendations. You can also sort by New Arrivals, which tries to give you new music that you will like, as well as standard Best Sellers and New and Noteworthy albums selected by eMusics editorial staff.Helping members find new music they will love is the key to eMusics business, and it needs to do a better job. eMusic has 400,000 paying subscribers who have downloaded250 million songssince 2003. Members can downloa
d anywhere from 30 to 75 tracks or 10-20 audio books a month before they have to start paying on a per track basis. Once people stop finding new music they want, they are more likely to cancel their subscriptions. Better recommendations would reduce that churn.eMusic wants to be your hipster friend who tells you about the latest, greatest bands before you hear about them anywhere else. How do we act like that hipster friend or that corner record store? asks senior vice president Jack Welde. He argues that the new recommendation engine will help them do that.Music and audio books recommendations are a hard nut to crack, especially from a cold start when the music service doesnt know anything about your tastes. The sites old recommendation engine provider, ChoiceStream, just wasnt cutting it. The MediaUnbound recommendation engine combines both algorithmic and human inputs to try to come up with better recommendations right from the get-go. It also is supposed to get better ov
er time, of course.On the algorithmic side, the recommendation engine looks at every action you take on eMusic, including searches, listening to 30-second previews, saving albums for later, and actually downloading albums. A download is weighted more than a preview. It builds a model for each member that takes into account genre preference, popularity interest, newness interest, experimentalism and expertise. MediaUnbound also takes into consideration global music preference patterns across P2P networks, Web radio, blogs, and other MediaUnbound music customers.On the human side, MediaUnbound has more than 40 music analysts that actively tweak the recommendation engine, and add in new music recommendations. They act like the independent record store clerks of yore. In fact, some of them used to be record store clerks, as well as DJs and musicians.How are MediaUnbounds music analysts different from the ones who classify music at Pandora? MediaUnbound CEO Michael Papish answers
me via e-mail:Pandora has created a feature factory of humans chained to headphones attempting to objectively rate the sonic features of every song ever made (well, ok, only ~200k hand-picked songs). We think this is a horrible use of use of the creative, constructive, opinionated, and (sometimes argumentative) resource called the human music geek.In fact, he had the following critique for all the competing music recommendation technologies out there from iTunes to iLike:To get your audio books check out emusic.com where they have all of your audio books you want.</p>
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