PODCAST: Go With The Flow; Moto Dives Into Liquid Music
Motorola is quietly crafting an approach to music content discovery, using mobile devices, that covers all the right bases. Its Liquid Music prototype service harnesses community (a must-have element of any discovery service going forward), and recommender technology (no user-pull search scheme will ever deliver searchers the long tail of entertainment content; that’s where discovery will rule – just try searching for “cool” tracks and you’ll see that I mean). After an eye-opening demo , I caught up with Venu Vasudevan, who heads the project, to find out more about Liquid Music and how it can enable what he calls “enhanced social networks and context-aware spontaneous” mobile music experiences. But this is not a collection of nice-but-not-here-now technology; Moto is working on multi-modal interfaces that would effectively make finding, buying and connecting with music – as well as like-minded fans – a no-brainer.
Listen to the podcast here.
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“The thought was why not take a good experience, that of listening to your favorite music over and over again, and overlay on it an even better experience by connecting the music you’re listening to to things that are musically related, (such as) people who have musical affinity to you, or people you know very well in your social network who you are wanting to know even better by understanding their musical taste,” Vasudevan observes.
This interaction enhances the user experience and paves the way for more compelling mcommerce schemes. “While you’re listening to something, you can get to the music presence capability we have. [This gives you] some sense of what your friends are listening to and then you can call them and say ‘I can’t believe you’re listening to [this artist] and sending a music clip’, which then leads to commerce.”
Next-gen recommenders: Forget collaborative filtering. “I think they took the music market to a certain level, but buying patterns don’t tell you very much about the people you respect.You’re beginning to see sites like Mog and MyStrands, which are really exploiting community and social affinities as a means for music discovery and to introduce new music to other people.” Moto is basically taking the same approach and adding the mobile element of the device and network which enhances the experience with context, location and connectivity with the group.
Keeping it simple: “It all starts with what is the piece you’re listening to. Based on that, we can fetch other pieces of information that augment, in a coherent fashion, this piece of music. It could be pictures, (such as) a picture that is thematically related to the mood of this music, from web 2.0 sites like Flickr. The music is really the core seed from which we expand in both the personal dimension as well as the content dimension, (with) lyrics, album art, pictures, concerts. So, we turn a digital item into a living experience around people, places and events.”
Read my mind:“I view social networks as having a concierge (function), much like my wine steward. Social networks facilitate an iterative conversation, that’s where we see things going, where you say try this, do you like it? One of my favorites in the online community is MOG, because MOG doesn’t just recommend stuff to you, it points you at people who are like you and it doesn’t tell me exactly how they’re like me. It allows me to have an iterative conversation with their digital persona by clicking at some of their songs, really determining if they are or are not like me and that allows me to be in the decision making loop of which part of the music really appeals to me.”
Come together: “I think a lot of this value proposition and music discovery is meta data driven, so I think you can see it play out fairly quickly in the mobile space as well once the success cases show up on the Internet….I do believe the unique value proposition of mobile is around the notion of proximity meeting affinity.”
