While Spotify and others have proven to be impressive innovators, the music business gets really interestingand change ripples into the mainstream when big online players jump in, as Apple just did. Over the weekend, Google signaled its increased interest in music and shared a roadmap while taking aim at its competitors.
As part of a BBC op-ed on machine learning and Artificial Intelligence, Google co-founder Eric Schmidt shared how his company approaches music online and took several swipes at Apple Music and others that put human curation at the center of their digital music services.
“…A decade ago, to launch a digital music service, you probably would have enlisted a handful of elite tastemakers to pick the hottest new music.
Today, you’re much better off building a smart system that can learn from the real world – what actual listeners are most likely to like next – and help you predict who and where the next Adele might be.
As a bonus, it’s a much less elitist taste-making process – much more democratic – allowing everyone to discover the next big star through our own collective tastes and not through the individual preferences of a select few.”
For Schmidt, the answer lies in the data – what fans are listening to and sharing with others – not with a hired curator/tastemaker.
“In the future, we need to do even more blending of AI research with solving real-world challenges.
In the next generation of software, machine learning won’t just be an add-on that improves performance a few percentage points; it will really replace traditional approaches.
