Revolutionary Music Recommendation Algorithm

Most music platforms like last.fm, Apple Music and Spotify recommend music to you by taking data about what type of music you listen to, then matching you with other users in their database with similar music tastes. Once this is done, the platform essentially recommends music to you that your match listens to and that you haven’t heard yet. This type of music recommendation is called collaborative filtering. This becomes a problem because it can cause you to only get recommended popular music and not actually discover any new artists.

Pandora changed that. Pandora is another music streaming service that recommended music in a way inspired by biological taxonomy. In order to do this, they started the Music Genome Project. Their company hired over fifty analysts to listen to each song on their platform and categorize it using a set of over 450 different attributes. With this information, they could develop a sort of musical DNA for each song. This was extremely powerful because now if you liked a song, Pandora could cross reference it with it’s entire collection and come up with a comprehensive list of songs that they think you’d like based on how the song actually sounds.

This was revolutionary, since it gave all the songs on their platform an even playing field while also giving much better music recommendations. One of Pandora’s best features is that they can actually justify why they chose a song with all of the attributes that it shares with the initial song you selected.

“Why Was This Track Selected?” option on Pandora

The issue that Pandora ran into is that since this classification process is highly manual in nature, their music selection is fairly limited in comparison to other platforms because the number of music curators wasn’t enough.

For the first time, we can overcome that problem.

By using cryptocurrency and smart contracts, imusify can now reward their users in real-time for curating new music on their platform.

This reward system will have two tiers. The first tier is open to all users, in which new music will be rated in terms of quality and will determine whether or not it should be listed on the platform. The second tier will consist of more qualified music listeners, who will be trained in curating new music in accordance with imusify’s musical taxonomy. These curators will assign attributes to songs in genres that they feel the most comfortable analyzing and will be rewarded with more IMU tokens than the first tier curators.

Pandora used their characteristics of songs to provide recommendations for users based on one song, since they were an online radio. imusify will use Artificial Intelligence to create an entire musical profile for each user that will cluster groups of preferred “musical DNA” and will constantly recommend new music based on these.

This new method for music recommendation was proven to work well with Pandora. It recommended music to users that they may not have been otherwise exposed to, providing them with much more opportunity to discover new artists that suited their tastes. Unfortunately, it was limited due to a lack of manpower.

imusify will leverage their user base and the convenience of using cryptocurrency and automated smart contracts for rewards to overcome this issue, and provide a more comprehensive and equal method of music recommendation than its competitors.