Musical taste

14 October 2005 @ 10:14 in Life
justforyou
One of the new features in iTunes 6 is Just for You, a service which analyses your past purchases and makes recommendations for new music you may like based on what you have already bought. In general, I like this model – one that Amazon uses to devastating effect – as it means that everyone's a winner: the retailer sells more, more obscure artists get a look-in, and, ultimately, the consumer gets to hear of music of which he might not previously been aware. Great.

The service does, however, rely on having enough data to analyse. Because I've bought so little music from iTMS, it appears to be struggling a little to make meaningful recommendations to me. If someone can play the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon and get me from Bach to Bon Jovi in six steps or fewer, I'll be mightily impressed. Do you think it's just alphabetical?