http://www.slaney.org/malcolm/yahoo/Casey2008-ContentBasedMIR-IEEEProc.pdf

You may be correct in saying that it takes a Shazam or other focused third-parties to see these opportunities and take these risks, though. Back at SIGIR 2004, I approached Sue Dumais from Microsoft Research and proposed doing music retrieval/recommendation. She basically said no, because (she said) Microsoft had already solved that problem. I think she basically meant that MSR had solved the audio song fingerprinting problem.. as Chris Burges had done at MSR back in 1998 (beating Shazam by 2 years, actually). But there is so much more to MIR than audio fingerprinting.

And in 2004, that is when the space was really starting to heat up. Last.fm had only been founded a few months earlier. Pandora was around, but it wasn’t B2C yet. So back then was the right time that Microsoft should have put an initial offering into the marketplace. I tried my best to convince ‘em.. but ultimately could not.

Our feature is a little different than the others, and given the comments from our users, I’m glad to hear people like it. We didn’t have the luxury of conducting online experiments with it before launching, but in this case we threw it out there, and people love it. It’s very gratifying.

Incidentally, Zune had Buy from FM about a year ago, but it’s not much smarter than what the iPod does. Even though devices like the iPod and now the Zune HD have a lot of processing power to extract audio features and ship them to the cloud, it takes a Shazam or other focused third-party to see an opportunity and take the risk. Speaking from my experience in the product world, getting to market soon and cheaply often trumps investment in the state of the art.

t

That’s kinda.. lame. Apple pitches the feature on their website as: “You’re listening to the radio and you hear a song you like, but when you go to iTunes, you can’t remember the name or even who sings it. Enter iTunes Tagging.” That doesn’t even make sense anymore. How would you not remember the name or even who sings it.. when it’s right on the screen in front of you? So tagging is just “save to file” of that information?

Much more useful to me would have been the audio fingerprinting feature. I could use it not only for full songs on the radio, but for song snippets (as they occasionally play on NPR news and talk programs) and for the noisy pub scenario as well. Oh well.. Apple 2009 hasn’t even caught up to ISMIR 2000, I guess.

Then again, much more useful feature to me would have been to put 32 GB into the nano, rather than a video camera.