ARE MUSIC SERVICES AND CURATION WEBSITES SUFFICIENT TO DISCOVER NEW MUSIC?
The similarities between various pieces of music are more or less important, musically speaking. For that reason, when music listeners search for new music via the YMusic search engine, they can play with different parameters that help them to move from a group of pieces that present specific characteristics to another collection, more or less distant, according to their individual tastes and mood. YMusic, launched as a prototype and based on a new music theory, answers the queries that listeners have and search a database that currently contains thousands of titles, which are complex objects: as musical objects, they present different facets that are analyzed by YMusic’s algorithm in order to present the best matches to music listeners when they do a search. Also, listeners, manipulating YMusic’s features, can gain insights related to the structure of a piece of music, and to some extent understand how the composer wrote it. Insisting on a particular feature, they can conceive an appropriate representation of the corresponding musical content.
But why a music search engine? Over time, various music formats have been developed to conserve music, first physical, then digital, and now digital music is accessible everywhere. Aren’t music streaming services and music curation websites enough to find new music? Yes and no: music streaming services contain millions of songs and curation websites give advice related to music niches. That is useful: both types of services help to discover new music more or less easily, according to the latest music industry trends and social sharing. However, music that is less recent is not directly available to younger listeners because they do not know old titles, while older listeners can be a little confused faced with new genres they cannot name. And the result of that situation is that each generation stays in a sort of musical ghetto. And younger listeners, more influenced by the media and by their peers, do not automatically see the point of exploring more.
That is why the YMusic search engine is helpful, most music listeners being conservative when it comes to music listening: it extracts musical information from music itself and breaks down cultural barriers linked to a listener’s gender, age and location as well as those related to music genres, which are a useful way to classify music but which prevent serendipitous music discovery. Yet serendipity, that kind of regulated chance which leads from one find to another, is good: it can help music listeners to escape from nostalgia and from restrictive)value judgments linked to music genres. Furthermore, freed from the tyranny of external advice via automatic recommendation or social sharing, music listeners can finally dedicate their music listening time to an exploration of their own needs. Because if music is a common space, it is also very subjective and all listeners deserve to get the chance to know more about the styles of music they love and to learn about themselves through music. To find once again the latest music heard during a music festival, music streaming services and curation websites are efficient: festivals and other online music services are often partners in order to optimize customer acquisition and retention. To get more musical knowledge and deepen individual tastes, YMusic is more suitable.