On music
- Describe the music you want
"Sad songs for a rainy drive" beats any genre taxonomy. Natural language is becoming the way people ask for music, and it changes what a music recommender has to understand.
2 min reads likes comments - Music generation's GPT-3 moment
Suno v3 and Udio generate full songs with vocals and lyrics from a sentence, and some of them are good. What that means for artists, platforms and listeners.
2 min reads likes comments - Fake Drake
An AI-generated song imitating Drake and The Weeknd got millions of plays before it was pulled. Voice is identity, and the industry needs consent and attribution systems, fast.
2 min reads likes comments - Text to music is a representation problem
Google Research's MusicLM generates music from text descriptions. The interesting part is its stack of tokens: one for meaning, one for sound, one shared between music and words.
2 min reads likes comments - Listening sessions are sentences
Treat each song as a token and each listening session as a sentence, and recommendation starts to look like language modeling. What that framing gets right, and what it misses.
2 min reads likes comments - You can't skim a song
Why music recommendation is a different problem from video or news recommendation: sequences, repetition, passive listening, and the difference between a skip and a mood.
2 min reads likes comments - Joining YouTube Music: the recommendation is the product
I've started as an engineering manager at YouTube Music. Why music, and why I think the next few years of music discovery will look very different.
2 min reads likes comments - Ten years between albums
万能青年旅店 released their second album after ten years. On listening to a band that sings about industrial decline in Hebei, and why art gets better once you can see the structure under it.
2 min reads likes comments - Travis Scott played to 12 million people in a video game
Fortnite's Astronomical event drew 12 million concurrent players. With every venue closed, a game became the biggest concert stage in the world.
2 min reads likes comments - AC/DC at sixty
Angus Young is sixty and still runs across the stage in a school uniform. Some thoughts after the show.
2 min reads likes comments - Apple bets on human DJs. I'd bet on the skip button
Apple Music launched with Beats 1 and human curators. Three weeks later, Spotify ships Discover Weekly. Two theories of music discovery.
2 min reads likes comments