Music 4,.

1. Reaching the social mass-market
Tim Hadley, Rara.com
#m4pt5
Event partners
#socialmusic
Music 4.5 is
organised by

2. Music 4.5: Reaching the Social Mass Market
(Do humans still have a place in music recommendation or are the robots taking over)
Tim Hadley
Director, rara.com
November 2012

3. rara.com
User experience to attract the mass market
• Simple and beautiful user interface
• Intuitive, easy to use
• Browser based: access on any PC or Mac
• iOS / Android / Windows 8 apps
• On-demand search and play
• Curated channels and playlists
• Music track/album sharing
• Advert free, uninterrupted listening

4. rara.com
International music streaming
International reach:
• Live across 27 countries
• Global licensed catalogue: 18 million tracks
• Licenses with all four major labels and leading
independents
Global local service:
• Localised catalogue for every country live
• Channels and playlists curated by local
musicologist from each country

5. Localised curation
Channels curated to local music tastes
The majority of consumers do not want to program their
experience and are challenged when faced with a search box
Curated channels and recommendation:
• rara.com is a hybrid of radio and fully on-demand
• Curation is focused on local tastes
Human recommendation:
• Human curators for each market
• Channels, playlists: Genre, Era, Mood, Great Playlists
Algorithmic recommendation:
• “You might like” algorithmic recommendations
• “Related artists” nearest neighbour artist recommendations

6. The problem: what do I listen to?
Radio: Digital music services:
• 100 – 120 track weekly playlists • 28,000,000 tracks

7. Recommendation sources
Pre-internet: Internet:
• Friend • Social: Twitter / Facebook
• Radio • Websites
• TV • Digital music services
• Magazines
• Advertising

8. The solution: recommendation sources
Human: Algorithm: (the Robots)
• Friends • Music services
• Experts / artists / celebrities
• Media
• Music services

9. Putting music in boxes
Track attributes: content owner/creator
Current level of detail provided by content owner/creator:
Content owner/creator track attributes:
• Track
• Artist
• Album
• Genre
• Length
• ISRC
• Copyright owner
• Publisher

10. Putting music in boxes
Track attributes: meta data providers
Meta data providers: enriching data
Meta data providers: Additional attributes include:
• Gracenote • Social: Twitter / Facebook
• ROVI • Tempo
• The EchoNest • Sub genres: circa 800
• Richseam • Era
• Mood: over 100
• Pitch
• Loudness
• Artist relationships / touring / covers / moves

11. Humans working with the robots
What’s happening today
Most music service recommendations today use combination of
human + robot
Music services utilising combinations of human + algorithm
based recommendations:
• Human generated catagorisation
• Scrobbling / crowd sourced plays
Algorithmically generated playlists:
• Likes + listening + artist channels + nearest neighbour
• Social media recommendations

12. Thank you
Confidential © rara.com 2012

13. Thank you to our event partners
#m4pt5
#smartradio Music 4.5 is organised by