"mp3" in Weblog

The Netflix $1 million competition to improve their recommendation engine has reminded me of something I said to my brother in Virgin Megastore the other night… I’d wandered in to kill some time while waiting for him to turn up for a gig, which is something I used to do a lot. I’ve spent hundreds of hours in music stores over the years. Mostly little indies but the big boys often get stuff the little chaps don’t and the sales can be interesting. What struck me this time though is that I got bored very quickly. Now that never happens to me while shopping for music! So what’s changed?

I’ve always been into fairly niche music. My vinyl addiction (now kicked) had me in and out of the hip hop shops around Brighton, Birmingham and London listening to dozens of records and chatting to other people in the shops. I’d take my stack to the desk to pay and the guy behind the counter, who I bought from and chatted to every week, would have another stack set aside for me to check out. Recommendations and pounding the pavement.

Then I moved over to buying a lot of my records from the internet. I’d chat to my mate J, who worked in a record shop in Leicester, listen to all the samples on Juno, read the Picadilly Records newsletter and make my choices. Recommentations and elbow grease.

When I stopped buying records I moved back to CDs. Both Amazon and Play do a decent job of divining my taste from previous purchases but I’ve relied a lot on late night MTV2, XFM, talking to friends and reading ArtistDirect bios to find new stuff. Over the last couple of years I’ve definitely not bought as much music as I used to. Recommendations, but more passive on my part.

In the last few months though I’ve started using Last.fm, MySpace and the iTunes Store. Last.fm, via AudioScrobbler, does an absolutely incredible job of figuring out my taste. And if I’m in a slightly different mood I can always go to the radio section and type in a few artists to get something that is outside of my normal listening preference. I also love the social aspect to it. Not from an interaction point of view but as a way of getting my friends’ recommendations at my own leisure. Every week I’ll have a browse through my friends’ profiles and listen to anything I don’t recognise. It’s social proof in its rawest form - they’re actually listening to this stuff so they must like it. If I’m taken with a track I’ll either buy through Last.fm or head to iTunes for instant gratification. I own the tracks within 30 seconds.

I use MySpace the same way - it allows me to mine my friends’ recommendations. I’ve found some great stuff just wandering through profiles. If I like what I find I’ll either download songs direct from the band’s profile or search the iTunes Store.

All of a sudden I’m back buying music again. And lots of it. I’ve bought 108 songs from the iTunes Store in the last month and that doesn’t include the stuff I’ve got from Bleep and various other MP3 stores. Most importantly though, I’m absoluitely loving it.

I reckon that I’m a classic Long Tail consumer. Yes, I’m interested in some stuff from the head, but for the most part I’m niche. If you look at my consumer behaviour over the years I fit exactly the profile that recommendation engines are trying to cater to. And I have grown to expect that kind of service. Virgin just can’t compete. It doesn’t carry the music I want and it has no way of directing me to it even if it did. Even during sales their physical products aren’t much cheaper than Play or Amazon Marketplace and I can get instant access to my purchase from iTunes or Bleep if that’s what I want. So what can they offer me? Very, very little indeed.