Moar Contagious Media

Going Head to Head with Genious

Engineers from the University of California at San Diego are developing a system to compete with Itunes' Genius software. Genious, originating from apple, uses popularity to give it's users suggestions on new music. The students and researchers at UCSD feel a different approach is needed in order to reach the "underground artist".

Using a classifying holistic model for their software, it creates a feel like Pandora, a site that plays songs based on the music you like, ranked not by popularity, but different gauges of the song's sound. Using a game called Herd it to test and catch data, they train statistical models and teach the machine links between different styles of music. The experiments they've used show that automatic recommendations work as well if not better than Genious at matching unheard artists with popular music.