Can Computers Pick the Next Big Thing?

Article from Business Week:

In the early 2000s, a handful of entrepreneurs became convinced that machines could mimic human taste and effectively predict popularity. This was a revolutionary notion, suggesting that the talents of legendary tastemakers—the Harvey Weinsteins and Clive Davises—could be replicated by silicon and algorithms. In melodramatic terms, the idea represented an escalation in the war between humans and machines, furthering the debate over what skills and faculties, if any, are unique to homo sapiens.

With each passing year, the humanists appear to lose ground. In 1997 an IBM supercomputer named Deep Blue beat the world's best chess player, Garry Kasparov, in a six-game match. Kasparov later wrote off Deep Blue and its relatives as "brute-force programs" that played chess with no creativity, no concern for "hundreds of years of established theory."

Kasparov would have had little patience for the would-be hit predictors, who, for the last decade or so, have tried to do for art and culture what Deep Blue did for chess. Generally, they distilled a piece of content to its numerical essence. Songs were easiest, because their underlying structure is mostly math. Companies and research centers such as The Echo Nest and the International Society for Music Information Retrieval built up databases and correlated variables like pitch, tempo, and melody. By correlating them with historical information on how the song fared in the market, the hit predictors could make an educated guess about whether a brand-new song stood a chance of topping the charts.

One company trying to do this was called Hit Song Science, founded in Barcelona in 2001. Hit Song Science had some early success. In 2002, as the team was fine-tuning its algorithms, HSS determined that 8 of the 14 tracks on an album by a then-obscure singer had genuine hit material. That album, Come Away with Me by Norah Jones, subsequently sold more than 10 million copies.

The same year, an executive at BMG who was promoting a new band, Maroon 5, got in touch with Mike McCready, one of HSS's co-founders. The band's single, Harder to Breathe, was going nowhere, and the BMG executive needed help. Running the album through his software, McCready determined that another track, This Love, had much greater hit potential. The executive sent the new single to radio stations, and Maroon 5's album, Songs About Jane, went triple platinum.

As a business, HSS was not quite as successful. Many predictions turned out to be duds. The algorithms rated Michael Jackson's Billie Jean a flop and a six-minute instrumental a surefire hit. "We discovered we couldn't make the bold kind of claims we were hoping we could make with this technology," says McCready, who left the company in 2006. He now runs a website called Music Xray that helps match music executives and musicians. "The technology might get there someday, but it's not there now."

Full article:
Can Computers Pick the Next Big Thing? - BusinessWeek

I suppose we are heading in the direction of AI, and then things start get very scary.... from picking chart hits to doomsday scenario

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Not the next big thing, just an oldie but something that still sends shivers down my spine ...

Was introduced to a counselling software progam years ago that was so "human" you only sussed it was a machine minutes into telling it about your hypothetical problem ....

Must admit I don't find Norton's automated problem-solvers terribly helpful, though.

Linda

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There used to be one out there, I think called iGod which was usually a computer and then occasionally a human would take over.

I found it very soothing - not so much because I told it my innermost thoughts and feelings (I don't have that much trust), but because it was very distracting trying to figure out how it worked, where the loops were, etc.

Going to have to google now to see if it still exists.

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computers are only as smart as the humans that make them, this is why those japanese guys & gals have names like 'Quad core, 8gb Ram'
No really though that's kind of spooky? I wonder what would happen if a super computer said that Mc Hammer was popular again would everyone accept it and start wearing parachute pants?

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It all gets down to the data: garbage in = garbage out.

If there is sufficient research & data to determine what people like for a specific item/niche, and it can be quantified mathematically - then, its reasonable to assume a computer would be able to extrapolate probable things that people would like.

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Swings and roundabouts enit, everything comes in and goes out.

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Such a true statement, number of times you hear people moaning about dodgy results a computer pumps out, or another govt system churning out the wrong data and costing the tax payer another billion...

crap in, crap out

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