TECHNOLOGY ENTREPRENEURSHIP: A SEARCH ENGINE IN THE FIELD OF MUSIC
Entrepreneurship can be seen as a process that identifies and reduces business risks related to people, technology, finance and market, that process being supported by a business plan. It creates value by exploiting inventions. And technology entrepreneurship can be defined as the ability to identify opportunities in the field of business and to transform them into high-potential projects. Technology entrepreneurship, which wants to create a positive impact on society, is thus ethical. In the current context of internet, which accords a particular place to search engines, it is linked to knowledge acquisition.
Search engine technology has its roots in information retrieval and was first developed in academic institutions like Stanford University, at the frontier of computer science and library science, also called information science. Nowadays, the development of a search engine is autonomous. A search engine is grafted onto a browser which is a piece of software, and the browser itself is grafted onto a computer, which is of course a piece of hardware. Search engines’ business models evolved through time. First, funded by venture capital, they made connections with internet service providers and browser manufacturers. The market, then, was competitive. After that, various search engines created content channels in partnership with advertising companies. However some companies continued to be funded by venture capital and to evolve at the technical level, sometimes licensing searching to other websites.
Even if general search engines are numerous today, only some of them are influential in terms of market share. And specialized search engines are numerous too, but they are not very popular. Yet in the field of music, the creation of the YMusic search engine wants to change that situation. YMusic is based on a new music theory and is now launched as a prototype. It is not a music streaming service, a music critic website or a music archive. Currently, the music search engine industry does not exist. YMusic is here to convey to music listeners new ways of experiencing music listening. Based on musical criteria, it helps listeners to put a name on the main aspects of music and thus to get access to music analysis at the musical level. Acquiring knowledge related to the functioning of music, listeners can become more aware of what they like in music, generally speaking, and, in particular, why they like the music they like.
Thus using YMusic, search after search, music listeners can find more and more music they really find likeable, independently of any trends and social recommendation, which are nice, but do not help music listeners to find their individual tastes, musically speaking. For example, music streaming services mainly provide music based on elementary cultural criteria like age, gender or location. As a search engine, YMusic analyzes the musical content of each piece of music in detail. Associated to a music database which currently contains thousands of titles, YMusic will continue to evolve.