iTunes Genius works because we are all uniquely the same

The new iTunes 8 brings a new fea­ture for your musi­cal plea­sure: Genius. This fea­ture works by pick­ing a song and having it sug­gest up to 100 others songs you would like based upon that one. For exam­ple: I picked “Aeroplane” by the Chili Pep­pers and it suggested:

• All Mixed Up - 311
• Pepper - But­t­hole Surfers
• Been Caught Steal­ing - Jane’s Addiction

And numer­ous others. It’s a great fea­ture because it cre­ates a playlist of songs that oth­er­wise I might not have chosen. And it does so with great insight into what I want to hear. How does it know what I like? No doubt it was inspired by Pan­dora, but does Apple use the same algo­rith­mic approach? After some sig­nif­i­cant research, the answer is no. The genius behind iTunes Genius come from the behav­ior of the iTunes community.

Using my exam­ple from the Chili Pepper’s “Aeroplane”, Genius works like this:

• Who else on iTunes has down­loaded “Aeroplane”?
• What other iTunes songs did the “Aeroplane” com­mu­nity play within the same genre and release date?
• How many times has the com­mu­nity played “Aeroplane” com­pared to other songs in their library?
• What other iTunes songs did the com­mu­nity pur­chase? Skip over? Rate favorably?

There is a high pri­or­ity placed on the release date. “Going to California” from Led Zep­pelin brings up sig­nif­i­cantly more 70’s songs than “I Want to Be the Boy…”, a sim­i­lar blues tune from The White Stripes. All of these fac­tors are com­piled into a “tag” that is then picked up by the Genius playlist gen­er­a­tor. As more data is uploaded to iTunes, the rec­om­men­da­tions will change and improve.

Notice I say iTunes songs. Genius doesn’t work for The Bea­t­les or any­thing off the bonus disc of Radiohead’s In Rain­bows. The song must be avail­able for pur­chase in iTunes for Genius to rec­om­mend it. It can’t rec­om­mend a song it doesn’t know the com­mu­nity lis­tens to.

The inter­est­ing thing about Genius is that it proves that for the most part, people tend to like the same things musi­cally. If you like, “Aeroplane”, chances are you also like “Remedy” by The Black Crowes. Apple proves a con­cept of musi­cal com­mu­nity by sug­gest­ing songs that our friends and their friends are play­ing. It’s a social media appli­ca­tion in the largest con­text. Instead of our friends burn­ing mix CDs for us to explore, their mix CD choices are sent to Apple along with mil­lions of others to create the world’s largest mix CD for all of us to enjoy. And if you don’t have the songs every­one is play­ing, the “convenient” Genius Side­bar tells us what songs our friends are lis­ten­ing to that we don’t yet own.

While there’s no doubt Apple is get­ting a boost from this fea­ture (I’m sure incre­men­tal song pur­chases through Genius are sky­rock­et­ing), I’m thank­ful that Apple cre­ated the tech­nol­ogy to bring us all a little closer. Like Face­book or Twit­ter, the power of social media is not in the tech­nol­ogy itself, but in how it draws us to those with sim­i­lar inter­ests. Social Media works like a cell phone. People don’t marvel in cel­lu­lar tech­nol­ogy as much as that they can chat with grandma in New Jersey while stuck in traf­fic in Dallas. The genius behind iTunes Genius is that through aggre­gat­ing our favorite songs, we are pleas­antly sur­prised each time a for­got­ten song flows per­fectly into our (and our mil­lions of iTunes friends’) earphones.