Bizarre New Music Recommendation System

US Deletes The Music You Shouldn't Listen To Anymore From Your Computer 07/09/10

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Developer Brian Whitman has a strong aversion to music services that tell you what you should listen to.

So he came up with an alternative:

To perhaps get myself more comfortable with a future in which children will no longer ask their cooler older dope-smoking brothers what to listen to in lieu of some HTML table in a UL, I decided to really sign up wholesale to this movement.

If we rely on these computer programs to learn about music, well we might as well rely on them to fix the sins of our past and delete the crap we are obviously not meant to listen to anymore.

Future of Music (2010) is a Mac OS X app that scans your iTunes library and computes the music you are not supposed to listen to anymore based on your preferences. It then helpfully deletes it from iTunes and your hard drive. Skips the recycle bin. Just like other recommender systems,

it uses a lot of fancy math (and data from Echo Nest and last.fm) that really doesn't matter in the end. Just click the button and let it take care of your life.

Whitman's app seems to be made with tongue firmly planted in cheek - but makes a point: if you can't trust an app to decide what you shouldn't listen to anymore, should you trust an app to tell you what you should listen to?

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