Cam and I had an interesting email conversation this week concerning the commercial use of music analysis software to identify potential hits etc. I’d thought I’d post it here as a discussion point. What you YOU think?
— CAMERON WROTE TO HAL
I got signed up to the beta of a service the other day that’s like
Pandora on Steroids ( http://www.uplaya.com/ ). Rather than use
musicologists they’ve got some boffins to devise a set of dynamic
algorhythms which analyse music and put it into all sorts of categories
and find ways of linking stuff together.
Anyhow, as they have some smart artist pages I was wondering about
getting
all our Young Punx tracks into this, and also put them through their “Hit Song
Science” machine (http://www.hitsongscience.com/) to
let us know which songs they think have the highest potential of
being hits, and also analyse which bands we “sound like”.
If you could upload tracks and artwork somewhere, I’ll send him the
link and get them ingested etc.
Obviously the whole idea of a world where computers predict hits is
rather dystopian, but might be interesting to see if there are any
“hidden gems” in our back catalogue / coming up.
— HAL REPLIED TO CAMERON
God, these programs are the work of satan.
They are the one thing that could send the entire music industry to
its grave
A computer can accurately tell you that your song sounds like many
successful songs in the past, i.e. is not original.
