Thoughts on iTunes Genius

Posted on Wednesday, September 10th, 2008 at 9:56 AM by Chris Lentz

I will start by saying that I am a huge supporter of Pandora. When I heard about this Pandora like service being built into iTunes, I am stoked because Pandora is looking like it might go out of business. I was very hopeful that iTunes 8 would fill the void in my life that is going to be created when/if Pandora disappears.

I have been playing with iTunes 8 and the new Genius functionality, and I am not very impressed. I like the new viewing options available in iTunes 8, and the new visualizations are stunning, but iTunes Genius is a different story.

iTunes Genius goes through and analyzes your music collection when you first install iTunes 8. From there, it allows you to click the Genius button when you select a song, and it will auto create a playlist filling with a preset number of songs that iTunes believe are along the same style of music. Well, it doesn’t work. I am going to give Apple the benefit of the doubt, that this service will improve once more people experiment with it, but for now, it is no good. Let me give you and example:

As you can see I created a iTunes Genius playlist based on the song I Kissed a Girl by Katy Perry, and what is this, Disturbed showed up in the results? Those songs could not be more opposite.

What are your thoughts on iTunes 8 and the new Genius integration? Have you had any strange results appear when using the Genius playlist creator?

......

I think it worked. The list is all shit songs!!!

Bill

I think the relating factor between all those songs is their horridness.

Chris Lentz

haha! Don't Judge!

akacapa

From what I understand, Pandora and Genius don't work in exactly the same way. Pandora uses the Music Genome project, which has categorized all the songs according to properties of the song itself, thus linking together music that sounds the same. On the other hand, Genius works by looking at other users who have that particular song, what other music they have purchased, what other songs tend to coexist in playlists with that song, etc. So it's linking together music that people tend to listen to, given that they enjoy a particular song (if that makes any sense). It might become more "accurate" once more people activate Genius, or it might not -- I wonder how users with very eclectic music tastes would affect the system.

Peter

Genius sucks. I chose a love ballad, to make things easier for the system, I still got a list that was useless, with seemingly just random stuff. Use "party mix" instead. Just as good!