Apple's Genius is pretty genius
Apple unveiled iTunes 8 yesterday and they were highly touting a feature named Genius. There are really two components to the feature. One is a new sidebar you open in iTunes. Whenever you click on a song, the sidebar shows albums and songs by the artist you don’t already own, and gives you suggestions of music by other artists that are similar.
Each entry in the sidebar has the BUY button next to it, so you can purchase music from Apple immediately. It’s all about selling extra music to the customer. Since I don’t buy music from iTunes (I use Amazon’s DRM-free MP3 store instead) the sidebar won’t prompt me to buy anything from Apple. If I open it, it’s to see what I might be missing that I can buy elsewhere. Most times, I imagine that sidebar will be closed however.
The REAL genius of Genius comes in the automatic playlists. Basically you pick any song, and then click the Genius button and iTunes creates a playlist of similar music. This is great when you are in the mood for a particular type of song and just want to hear stuff that’s similar.
I personally have 123 GB of MP3’s. I turned Genius on and it took nearly two hours to complete its analysis, but once it was done, the playlists it created were really cool. When I want a quick fix of a particular type of music, Genius fits the bill perfectly. It’s absolutely perfect for my wife too. She loves music, but never remembers names of artists or songs. So now, all she has to do is remember one song, and then click the Genius button to get a list of similar tunes.
I’ve read online that many people’s experience seems way off with weird combinations of music coming together, but I have to say that our experience is exactly the opposite. Maybe it’s because our library has more data to work with, I dunno. Anyway, we clicked the Genius button probably a dozen times and each playlist was pretty good. Every once in awhile a song or two didn’t seem to quite fit, but listening to it probably wouldn’t seem too jarring.
So for me, this is a very welcome addition, and for my wife this vastly expands the amount of music she’ll be exposed to. It’s in a word, Genius.
September 10, 2008 @ 7:31 pm
Kinda like MusicIP?
{ Link }
September 10, 2008 @ 7:41 pm
@1 I read your comment a little to quickly and musicP can to mind, as in Genius is the adminP of music…. i so need sleep.
@John, I had never heard of this feature until Lunch where i was given the run down by someone that had used it for a couple hours. I almost laughed when i read your post because the whole time he was explain it I was thinking how much my wife would love it.
September 10, 2008 @ 8:14 pm
Actually more like Pandora or Last.fm in my opinion. Not sure if they tap into the Music Genome Project or not, but it would be nice if they were sharing data between the two services!
And don’t worry Yancy, the feature was released yesterday for the first time with iTunes 8, so that’s how new it is.
Pandora really has been doing this kind of thing for awhile though, so you might want to check them out too…
Take Care,
Grey
September 11, 2008 @ 8:08 pm
You know, I was going to ignore the Genius option because it was panned by some Apple blogs I follow. But I took your word for it and tried it out. And I have to say, you were absolutely right. It’s very, very good. Oh, it chokes on obscure songs, but that’s hardly surprising.
Anyway, just tipping my (literal) hat to you, Grey.
September 11, 2008 @ 8:56 pm
From what I understand of how Genius works, it’s using that analysis data collectively back at Apple. So as their system gets more information, these things should get better. Sounds like they’re at least partially basing it on associations that the users are making.
I’d still like to see something like that but have it work like Pandora. Associating songs by their characteristics. I really like that they explain why a particular song was included in the list.