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As someone who worked for many years in the music business and has seen all sorts of stuff I am extremely skeptical. But I guess anything is possible eventually
by CPLX 3y ago
As someone who worked for many years in the music business and has seen all sorts of stuff I am extremely skeptical. But I guess anything is possible eventually.
With that said I wonder if they are suffering from a base rate problem.
The problem is that hit songs are VERY rare. If you feed people a ratio of 50% hits and 50% random stuff you might get solid numbers just by asking a guy named Bob what he thinks too. Hits are fairly distinctive when compared to random DIY music. So Bob will just pick the professional sounding stuff and Bob will be mostly right.
To be useful though you’d have to feed the system 20,000 songs, of which 100 are highly professionally produced songs from people who are competent and then identifying which 5 of those 100 are going to be hits, as well as the one fluke hit that’s in the DIY pool.
I bet it can’t do that.
- zeroonetwothree 3y agoIndeed, they even discuss in the article that hits are only about 4% of songs. Still, with 97% accuracy you theoretically turn 960 flops+40 hits into 29 flops+39 hits which is massively better.
- CPLX 3y agoNot really. The real task for those who actually do this is being able to sell songs that basically seem like they might be hits from ones that actually are. The reason is that it costs money and time and effort to try to get attention for the songs to actually make them hit songs. Most songs are just obviously not going to be hit songs they aren’t even in the same ballpark. The classic mistake for a budding indie record label owner or producer is to audition 31 people and then say wow this person is better than all of them so that’s the one that will be a success. Except none of them are ever going anywhere. Conversely, the problem for a budding major label or high profile executive is to audition 31 people all of whom are actually quite good but only one or two are going to be hits. They’re all great that’s how they got in the door, but which one is the star? These are hard problems. Harder than people realize. So anyways for a machine system have to use songs that obviously have no real strong appeal to anyone at all as the starting point for analysis. Otherwise it’s just useless.
- Applejinx 3y agoThat is wildly, wildly out of line. They're out of their minds if they think 4% of songs actively attempting to be hit songs, get there. Even if we rule out obvious failures (and this class of song produces surprise hits, in part through novelty!) the number of songs trying to do this and failing is WAY higher than 97%. I'm not sure people quite understand how many songs are attempted…