Given the great results of creating bulleted lists or corporate presentations based on pop songs, I thought I just had to try it out.

“I’m Too Sexy” by Right Said Fred

• Things I am too sexy for:

• my love
• my shirt
• Milan
• New York
• Japan
• your party
• my car
• my hat
• my cat
• this song

• A model
• So sexy it hurts
• Too sexy by far

• do my little turn on the catwalk
• shake my little touche on the catwalk

• disco dancing

There are now over 20 albums in the top 100 hot sellers on Amazon.com (that’s one-fifth!) that are not released by RIAA members. This is the highest point since I have been tracking it, which started in October 2003. (Here is my report page, if you want to follow along.)

Dear Lazyweb, please make an iPod hack that will display the album art on my older iPod, using ASCII characters. Thanks in advance.

Random personal notes on this “article” in the New York Times on how people use playlists and randomization:

• This entry is an excellent instant reaction to the piece. Why are such simple functions (shuffle, smart playlists) so unknown and mysterious?
• Mr. Angus (although somewhat fruity) is creating playlists for specific purposes. Good!
• Smart playlists will not solve the randomization or conspiracy theory problem. Smart playlists are based on completely objective data. The only way you could never have an “incorrect” song play is by providing/accessing metadata about uses and meanings of particular songs.
• Saving the uses and meanings of songs is, oddly enough, exactly the kind of stuff that I am doing with Mixmatcher. As people add songs to playlists, it is relating that song with some sort of subjective metadata. Over time, you will be able to get an understanding of what a song means, along with its possible uses based on the playlists it has been added to, without having to know the song beforehand.
• I really like the idea of TuneTags, which is basically creating adhoc metadata (ala del.icio.us) for songs. Let people tag them however they want to describe them, and let the aggregation sort out what is the most popular way of tagging. (“Kill them all and let a Norse God sort ‘em out!”) I think the missing link with this idea is how to use this newfound data: What is the best way to make a mix for Mr. Angus bike workout? Create a smart playlists based on songs tagged with “upbeat” and “biking”? Are people really tagging things that way?
• I really like the possibilities of Mixmatcher or TuneTags for disovering new music. There are literally millions of songs that are published every week. There is no way to even begin picking the relevant (although not necessarily always “good”) songs out of that haystack. Even if only a small percentage of people tagging or sorting songs, I think it would still be providing enough data to make the songs useful to rest of the population. It would at least level the playing field, instead of 99% of those songs being obscure in a month.
• I think tagging ala del.icio.us might end up being easier and thus more popular, but that alone wouldn’t be giving people the final end product they desire. Even if you do give people another way to access the music, you still don’t have the things that mixtapes do well: structure and specific song selection, often done by a trusted individual.
• I don’t want to say it, but Audioscrobbler is another app that I don’t think fulfills its potential and/or does a very good job of its mission priorities (if I am to go by what their site tells me) of a) building my musical profile, b) matching me to people with similar tastes, and c) personalized music recommendations. Part A is being handled very well, but Part B and Part C are basically one section or page of each user profile. Does anyone know of any apps built using their data?

  (This reminds me of one of my favorite jokes: Two women are eating at a restaurant. One says, “This food is terrible,” and the other woman says, “And such small portions!”)

This making sense to anybody?

I finally got a break from mudding and taping drywall, and I made Mixmatcher about a billion times faster. Turns out I only had it on 10, thus promptly turned it up to 11.

This feature from Engadget is nice, but I just wanted to nitpick, because the particular line I have an issue with is now being quoted elsewhere. The quote says:

Open up. Google did it, Amazon did, Apple did it, Netflix— expose your API so people out there can use www.netflix.com the way they want to, in new ways, in ways you haven’t imagined.

I don’t mean to break the euphoria, but although they may have developed a seemingly neat thing or two, they do not have an open API for the iPod or iTMS. (See also: iTunes Music Store wins a Webby when it’s not even a Web site)

Yes, I recently purchased an iPod. Yes, that means I am a big music nerd. Yes, that means I will further bore you with iPod minutia:

1. I would really like it if, after I sync my iPod with iTunes, it would submit any unaccounted playcounts to Audioscrobbler. I would suspect alot of people’s music consumption happens on their iPod instead of iTunes…
2. I would be a much more studious tagger if it wouldn’t keep switching away from the “rating” mode. I very rarely change the volume or fast forward into songs. All I do is rate. I want it to never leave that screen.
3. This is more of a product design thing, but I would really like to have the a more tactile option than the touchwheel. Sure, it’s nice and smooth, but I might favor a knob or thin disc with a little finger indent like on a home stereo. The main benefit would be to have it notched so that you “feel” the equivalent of a click as you browse menus or rate things. (I often select something wrong if I don’t squarely lift my finger off the touchwheel.) Success would mean being able to navigate/rate without ever having to look.

Mixmatcher is rolling along quite smoothly. The Belgians and Brazilians have begun to take over. Playlists are being made, and descriptions are being written. The XML feed of songs is isn’t showing every new song added in Bloglines, although the XML file has all of them in there. (Anyone know why? What is it checking to tell if there were changes? Is it reading a particular date? Is it expecting a certain type of date?)

I don’t know if I’m feeling masochistic or something, but for some reason I am going to open up Mixmatcher to you all, right now. Possibly for only a limited time, possibly forever. We’ll see how it goes. (Sorry, no circa 1998 launch party.)

What is Mixmatcher? Mixmatcher is part mixtape database, part playlist generator, part contextual music metadata database, part new way to discover new music, and part human collaborative filtering. Mixmatcher is a collaborative playlist environment, where people give meaning to songs by adding them to playlists. The more playlists that a song gets added to, the more meaning, contexts, and potential uses it gives that song. You’ll see when you get there. All comments and such should go to ben@magnetbox.com.

“We are entering a world of collective eclecticism, in which music lovers can guide one another into the hidden recesses of the library of recorded music.”