What values can digital music service provide for its users? : Personal value(1/3)

Not only traditional(?) online music service providers like iTunes but new music 2.0 sites like Last.fm are competing with each other in terms of giving more values and greater user experiences to the customers than ever before. I think there are basically three types of values all the music services should focus on.

First of them is personal value. Unlike offline cd store, online music store is supposed to have no physical limitation for archiving its catalog and in iTune's case it has over 6 million tracks. So in customer's perspective he/she can now browse and search any music content he/she want to listen to in online store. Consequently very 'Long-tail' can be seen, which has never been expected in offline. But users came to feel it not so easy to find out new music and even certain type of music they prefer among vast catalog.

That is, very important value proposition on this area comes up : personalized recommendation for target users. I know this is not a new story. Some big players like Amazon.com in products or contents recommendation area has been already out there. But the thing is how elaborately product or content could be recommended for target user.

To do that I think we need three components like well-organized product or content data set and user preference information in data perspective and recommender, a sort of recommendation algorithm or engine, which can effectively combine those two data sets.


(source : ChoiceSteam's Technology Brief)

Moving forward, how to balance these three components could be important factor in designing recommendation system. Each music service provider has its own recommendation system geared to its business model. iTunes and Pandora has adopted content-based recommendation system and Last.fm, on the other hand, is well-known for user-based collaborative-filtering recommendation by capturing massive users' behaviour. Well, in the long run a sort of hybrid system of those two would be final winner, I think. Who will run for it?