Apple's Genius music recommendations offer mixed results

Apple is receiving mixed reviews for its Genius software feature that Steve Jobs unveiled Tuesday. Genius comes with the latest version of iTunes.

The service first scans your music library. Then, when you pick a particular song, Genius generates a playlist of 25 other songs that it deems related. It also suggests songs that it considers missing from your digital music collection and, of course, offers to sell them to you right there through iTunes. An Apple executive told me at the event that he was skeptical at first about how useful Genius would be, but he used the service to program the music for his 20th high school reunion.

I tried out Genius and found that it worked well with rock, helping me rediscover my own library and uncover its limitations. But the service seems to stumble with older music in genres such as jazz and classical. When I asked Genius to work its magic on Duke Ellington's "Take the 'A' Train," it generated an error message saying it couldn't create a playlist. And it looks like others, such as ReadWriteWeb, have had similar experiences with Genius.

I got the same error message with Dusty Springfield's classic "The Look of Love." The sidebar did, however, tell me that I'm missing a bunch of Springfield classics such as "Take a Little Piece of My Heart" (How did I let this happen?) and 15 other songs by various artists that ...

... I might want to buy to complete the mood.

This could be addictive, as well as lucrative for Apple and the music industry. Jobs said Tuesday that iTunes has 65 million accounts with credit cards stored, and he reminded us that those 65 million people are only one click away from buying music. "This has enabled us to be the No. 1 music distributor in any format in the world," he said.

Couple that one-click purchase ability with the fact that iTunes is the tool millions of people use to manage their music libraries, and Genius could prompt a lot more buying.

Apple is late to the music recommendation party, as Nicholas Carr points out. And Genius doesn't provide what many online music fans have come to expect -- the ability to listen to recommended songs in their entirety, for free, before deciding whether to make a purchase. (Apple will let you sample 30 seconds.) What's more, there's no social networking; unlike recommendation and playlist services offered by sites such as Imeem, Last.fm, Playlist.com, Pandora and iLike, Apple's Genius offers no interaction with others and no exploration of other people's playlists via iTunes.

"Apple's job is to sell hardware," said Martin Stiksel, co-founder of Last.fm. "It's not going to make the most incredible music experience. ITunes is not a website, it's a media player. There's no social aspect to it."

But maybe iTunes doesn't need to be social. It just has to make Genius more genius.

-- Michelle Quinn

Photo: Apple Chief Executive Steve Jobs introducing new products, including Genius. Credit: Monica M. Davey / EPA

Comments

[crunch]

"I tried out Genius and found that it worked well with rock […] But the service seems to stumble with older music in genres such as jazz and classical."

I have a hunch that most iTunes users are into rock music. That would explain why the recommendations are quite good for that particular genre. If more jazz fans begin to use the service, the recommendation engine will get better. It just needs more data to crunch.

[Maya Dante Amihan]

No use at all to us in the Philippines, or other countries without iTunes. The message we get is, "Genius Sidebar is not available in your country."

One wonders if Apple is at all interested in expanding its iTunes market.

[Michael E. Cohen]

For Maya:
Of course, Apple is interested. However, they are constrained by contractual obligations to the music companies, and to copyright law and trade agreements with various non-U.S. markets. Negotiating the contracts and rights for each non-U.S. market takes time.

For crunch:
The Genius database and recommendations involve both anonymous information uploaded from users and information from the holdings in the iTunes Store. If the Store doesn't have it, the uploaded user information may still not yield recommendations (for example, I get no Genius playlist when I try to build one from a song by The Beatles, a rather popular band and one likely to be in the libraries of many iTunes users).

[bob]

didnt microsoft buy mongomusic which was the reference point for all of these systems? I think those were former apple guys right? what happened to all of that stuff? Does Microsoft still have it? where are the apple guys that made it?

something is weird here...

can Zune do this?

[Erio]

I am IMPRESSED by the genius feature. At first I thought it was just an excuse for Apple to dig deeper into your personal information (which it may still be) however, the Genius feature is far smarter than I could have imagined. I picked one 80's rock song and it came up with a perfect party mix instantly. I picked an obscure reggae song and it pieced together some really random music that I have from various small time independent artists. How it knew they would go together I have no clue, but I am a big fan. Thanks Apple from a guy who was bummed about his dying ipod.

[Val]

I tried it and the only thing I got were songs that I was missing that I could purchase for 99 cents. I was very disappointed. I even tried it from some playlists that I had created and it still did not offer the songs in my library. When I had a song in my library, it chose the artist instead of a song that I didn't need to buy. The other thing it did was to provide a whole album that I bought to use as a playlist. DUH. I regret letting Apple into my library now. I hope they do some serious tweaking, because Genius seems pretty dumb.