JonathanMelhuish.com

For the benefit of those who don’t really know what I’m up to (which includes me, most days), here’s a brief run-down.

About a year ago, I came up with some ideas about how various technologies could be combined to support independent artists, in a way that’s never been seen before. Essentially, the combination of:

• peer-to-peer networking, for near zero-cost distribution, made legal by Creative Commons-licensed music
• collaborative filtering-based recommendations, to sift the wheat from the chaff (regardless of the quantity of chaff!)
• online concert listings and e-ticketing for small-venue music events

None of which are particularly novel, but the combination of all three into a single easy desktop music-player application brings significant advantages:

• tracks can be downloaded automatically, based on recommendations
• recommendations can be used for “intelligent shuffle” playback
• music events can be recommended “on the desktop”
• e-ticket booking fees can provide revenue to keep the rest free

I hold the opinion that many internet ventures can, and therefore should, be done on a shoe-string. In keeping with that, I’m moving to Poland, where living is significantly cheaper, thanks in no small part to a beer costing less than €1! I’ll slave away on the code, enlisting the help of friends when I can and experts when I must.

On a more personal level, I see this as a chance to prove whether my dreams are feasible: whether I can survive in a foreign country where I struggle with even the alphabet, whether I can ‘work’ and travel at the same time, and whether I can manage a major project within the toughest of constraints. It might work, it might not, but one thing is for sure: it’s gonna be an interesting ride.

Music is an emotional experience. Raving about the flutter of John Coltrane’s saxophone reed is like praising the paintbrush strokes on the Mona Lisa - even if you have such unusual powers of musical analysis, it doesn’t really capture the essence of the work. As Steve Martin eloquently put it, “talking about music is like dancing about architecture.”

You know the best way to describe music? Don’t. Just give them a copy and let them make their own mind up. This is becoming steadily easier, thanks to advancing technology. Gone are the days of making a tape; just burn them a CD, email them an Mp3 or even just tell them the title and let them find it on a filesharing network. Okay, so there’s the small issue of copyright law, but that seems quite a distant problem compared to that of being able to share your emotion.

Despite the growing ease of sharing music, it’s still quite hard to find which friends share your musical taste, because everyone is so different. Effective music recommendation involves encountering someone who enjoys at least some subset of your musical tastes, remembering what they like, and then remembering to tell them whenever you encounter something they might like. It’s quite a difficult cognitive challenge, and unless you do it regularly, you’re unlikely to do it very effectively.

Online services that assist this process are great, but there has to be something to do with that information in order to make it useful. Like, for example, being able to hear tracks that these people like, but you haven’t heard. Guess what? That’s called collaborative filtering, and that’s exactly how most recommendation services services work, like Last.fm’s Recommendation Radio.

Online “social networking” is the flavour of the day. Email, IM, blogs and social networking tools (like the ubiquitous MySpace) are becoming very popular, because they support and extend existing social networks. But the social network for music is ineffectual due to the communication barriers outlined above, and as such, a social networking tool for music deserves to be as sucessful as an architecural dance society.