I had a great call last week with Todd Beaupre, Yahoo! Music’s director of personalization. We talked about why people contribute preferences and other meta-content.
My theory of different strengths of incentive for user-contributed content was consistent with what they found. Todd’s focused on personalization, where people contribute preferences: not so much content as opinions. User-driven content is treated as a different topic and has a different guru at Yahoo!, so it’s important to understand that what follows applies just to how Yahoo! think about music personalization.
Yahoo! don’t offer users the ability to review music, just ratings. That makes sense to me: aesthetics are so personal that there’s no objective system by which music can be reviewed. Reviews are really crude similarity engines: “this person has like things that I like, so I’ll probably like the new stuff they like.” With a suitably large database of actual behaviour and preferences, machine learning can deliver better automated behaviours like this.
Yahoo! has identified five ways in which preferences can be used deliver value back to the user:
- Convenience: narrowing space down to just their areas of interest. You can identify genres you like and don’t, and the music shown in the UI conforms itself to your tastes.
- Direct specific personalization, which I think of as “news” or “feeds”: you say you’re interested in this particular artists and you find out when they’re on tour near you, get news about their antics, etc.
- Related items: currently all “artists like this” for browsing and recommendations are based off user preferences.
- Self-expression: they cater to taste-makers who spread the word. They build a profile and generate their own radio station, feeling empowered.
- Community status: ratings bubble up into a descriptor of the user that they can put on their profile page. It’s like levels in a game.
The last point made me send Todd a pointer to Amy Jo Kim’s fantastic ETech presentation (and this discussion of it), and in return he sent me the list of levels in Yahoo! Music. Fascinating stuff.