Music-to-Music search by Clio Could Power Your Favorite Music Service

Listening to and discovering music on the internet is becoming a very popular thing. One of the first examples of music discovery was from Pandora who created the Music Genome Project. Experts in music theory would analyze and tag songs by hand, but the key thing to point out about Pandora is their strict use of humans instead of machines. It seems to me that they truly believe humans are the only way to properly analyze music, but what if other technologies prove to identify music the same way a human would?

Clio is a technology that is aiming to do just that, and has the potential to change the way we search for music. The technology works by analyzing many things including the tempo and perceived mood of the song. Think about your taste(s) in music. Some people have a diverse musical craving, but many like the sound of certain chord progressions, or feelings. In terms of a music discovery service this could actually prove to be better than a service like Pandora, because of it’s ability to break you out of your typical “shell”.

Pandora was designed in a way that keeps you in a “bubble” when you’re trying to find new music. I often hear several of the same artists and crave to discover more. To be honest, I think it’s actually better to search for Genres in some cases if you’re trying to discover completely new tunes.

Every station you’ve added in Pandora was influenced by textual search, or the use the categories. Clio says that music-to-music search is the future, so instead of thinking of Clio as “the next new music service”, think of them as a company who plans to power services that distribute music to consumers.

Clio Music was founded by DR. Greg Wilder who also founded Orpheus Media Research back in 2007. Dr. Greg Wilder and COO, Alison Conard of Clio are both knowledgeable experts in the field of music. If you’re interested in learning more we will be conducting an interview with both of them on Friday 07/29/2011, so check back for the audio interview in it’s entirety.

Here is the promo-video showing the goal of Clio’s service.

You might want to listen to this audio file. It starts with a seed track, and based off that it determines the overall mood and feel of the song. The matches are surprisingly good and show the potential this music service can have. Their ability to analyze tracks on a different level could definitely change the way music is found. It’s discouraging when Rdio doesn’t quite recommend what I’d really like.

Clio-Generated Playlist – Rock by OrpheusMedia

Tagged as: clio music, music search, music-to-music search, rdio, spotify

This post was written by...

James Lenhart – who has written 671 posts on allGeek.

Editor-In-Chief of allGeekTV -- Aside from my blogging adventures I love to listen to music of all kinds. I'm always thinking of something new, so keep an eye on me, but keep in mind I'm human and make mistakes.

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