
Show HN: Site for musical artist recommendations (and anti-recommendations) - gmjoe
http://ifyoudig.net/?shn
======
lux
As an independent artist, I don't see any info on how you might get your own
music into the site.

Services that rely on bigger services like Spotify (not sure where this site
gets its music, that's just an example) create a bit of a barrier to entry for
exactly the type of artist would would benefit most from a bit of extra
exposure.

It seems that many new "discover new music" services I see these days have
exactly this problem.

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weisser
This is really good because of how basic it is.

What's not so good is if you are a genre expert it doesn't do too deep of a
dive.

For instance I love the roots artist Guy Clark but I know every artist that is
recommended ([http://ifyoudig.net/guy-clark](http://ifyoudig.net/guy-clark)).
I like the majority of them so the suggestions aren't off by any means but it
would be nice to get more obscure (but still accurate) suggestions.

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shijie
I wonder where they could have gotten their data from. Their 'about' page
says, "If You Dig's results are calculated from the music preferences of a
whole lotta real people. Like, a lot."

I'd really like to know where this data comes from. The results are accurate
enough, but how can I know they'll become more accurate or improve over time?

~~~
gmjoe
New data comes in through
[http://ifyoudig.net/page/contribute](http://ifyoudig.net/page/contribute)

To incentivize people to keep contributing, the plan is to build a
notification service around your favorite artists, so you'll find out about
new artists/albums/songs that are related to your tastes.

So the more popular the site gets, the more data there will be :)

~~~
CWuestefeld
Just picking some random favorites, I looked at "Symphony X", and then flipped
over to "Least Likely". There are several artists there -- Adele, The
Offspring, Johnny Cash -- that I quite enjoy.

IMHO, it doesn't seem correct to ask people for their "favorite bands". It
would seem more accurate to ask them "when you're in a given mood, what bands
will you most enjoy hearing?". At the right times, I'd be equally happy to
hear Symphony X or Johnny Cash. But at any given time, I'm going to prefer one
or the other. So why not just let the contributors spell out those similarity
sets for you?

It seems to me that you're grouping things that are similar in some stronger
sense than that they're the favorites of some people. And conversely, the way
you're getting the data -- asking for _favorites_ you'd be missing out on a
bunch of minor bands that aren't anyone's favorite, but still enjoyed by
people.

~~~
Bsharp
This site finds similar artists to the one you search for. It has no reason to
expect you'll like The Offspring when you entered Symphony X.

It's like telling a friend you like Band X, and they say "Oh man, if you like
Band X, you'll probably like Similar Band Y! or Similar Band Z!" It would be
odd if you said you liked Jay-Z and someone recommended The Clash because
they're so different, even though it's not uncommon to like both.

~~~
CWuestefeld
That's exactly my point.

As the Contribute question stands, I might put Symphony X and Johnny Cash on
my list of favorites, which would make the site more likely to recommend one
in response to the other. But in real life, if someone asked me what I'd
recommend to a Johnny Cash fan, there's no way I'd answer Symphony X.

And I propose that the way to address this is to not ask the user "what are
your [unrelated] favorites", but rather, "pick a recent moment, and tell us
what music you would have most enjoyed hearing at that time". That implies a
stronger link than simply that the listed artists share a spot on my list of
unrelated favorites.

~~~
Bsharp
Reading comprehension fail on my part!

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rahulcap
This is pretty cool. I'm impressed with the quality of the recommendations and
really like how simple the site is. Some info on how you calculate the recs
would be interesting. (at least for this thread). I only wish the layout was a
little better on my phone. (Sent from iPhone)

PS I also second the other comments that the type ahead could be a little more
lenient.

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anonymoushn
This does a really good job: [http://ifyoudig.net/dark-
moor](http://ifyoudig.net/dark-moor)

Last.fm does alright:
[http://www.last.fm/music/Dark+Moor/+similar](http://www.last.fm/music/Dark+Moor/+similar)

Last.fm puts Galneryus on page 3, and Galneryus is sufficiently different that
I wouldn't trust the recommendations that score lower. Last.fm correctly
places Stratovarius above this cutoff, but Helloween, Sonata Arctica, and
Blind Guardian don't make the cut, and Ayreon is all the way down on page 10
with Van Canto and Turisas. Van Canto and Turisas are great, to be sure, they
are just way less similar to Dark Moor than Ayreon is.

Of course, Last.fm is better than nothing: [http://ifyoudig.net/mohican-
sandbag](http://ifyoudig.net/mohican-sandbag) vs.
[http://www.last.fm/music/Mohican+Sandbag/+similar](http://www.last.fm/music/Mohican+Sandbag/+similar)

Last.fm just reads tags, so a lot of artists have multiple names. モヒカンサンドバッグ
is the second result for being similar to itself! Last.fm also does a pretty
awful job by putting ORANGE★JAM and 3L on the first page, with dBu closely
following. Much more similar producers and circles like 和泉幸奇, Alstroemeria, or
IOSYS are nowhere to be found. Izmizm and Shibayan on page 1 are sensible. So
maybe Last.fm isn't all that much better than nothing...

I think this can be good, and I might even pay for it, but ultimately it will
be just one of a handful of half-solutions that need to be combined to get
quality discovery. Pandora and Google Music's instant playlist do better than
I would expect any people-who-like-x-also-like-y similarity system to do.
Unfortunately Pandora has like 7 artists in its library and Google Music's
instant playlist requires you to already have the music you are discovering,
which sort of misses the point.

~~~
srbucsh
I think the major problem with services like this is that they have things at
the far ends of the popularity bell curve fall off. Jcore being one of them.
Kind of a chicken and the egg problem where people who like any of a number of
niche generas come to the site, find it useless to them, and don't contribute.
perhaps some incentive for adding new artists could break this cycle? or even
just a link in the "Not Found" page tot he contribution suggesting if they
like that band to leave their favorites for others.

~~~
anonymoushn
I wonder how much a 15 write-in ballot helps things D:
[http://i.imgur.com/uT0X1HU.png](http://i.imgur.com/uT0X1HU.png)

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dfrey
It seems like this site is good for finding stuff that's similar to something
that I already like. What I really want is something where I can say: "Here's
everything that I like, now tell me something completely different that I will
also like".

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wreckimnaked
Great stuff! I happen to really like all recommendations that came in for me.

Some suggestions: this pure social graph approach could be vastly improved for
music recommendation by aggregating tags, à la last.fm, or adding music-
related features yielded by some waveform analysis.

For instance, I typed in Tame Impala and got these results in this order: Real
Estate - Girls - Beach Fossils - Toro Y Moi - Washed Out - Wavves - James
Blake. The first three relate well to modern psych rock of Tame Impala, but
then things get a little strange: two chillwave acts, one correctly similar
psych/noise rock act and a dubstep/downtempo artist!

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crazygringo
If you like Radiohead... "then you're LEAST LIKELY to dig..." Selena Gomez! -
[http://ifyoudig.net/radiohead/opposite](http://ifyoudig.net/radiohead/opposite)

~~~
rejschaap
The LEAST likely button seems quite useful. Search for "Britney Spears", hit
"Show LEAST likely". And you get a list of quality artists from a wide variety
of genres.

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circlefavshape
Looking at "contribute", it doesn't really reflect my listening patterns since
I starting listening to music almost exclusively by streaming. Once upon a
time I bought albums and had favourite artists, but now, for me, it's all
about the song. I don't really _have_ a favourite band anymore, and the stuff
I listen to most is one or two songs by this act, one or two songs by that act

It's not really a criticism, looking up stuff from the days I listened to
bands rather than songs it seems pretty accurate, but I dunno how I'd use it
in the present

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WoodenChair
Cool site. What technologies did you build it with?

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digitalboss
[http://ifyoudig.net/page/about](http://ifyoudig.net/page/about) \----- Note
for the nerds: the math is legit. We take sample size into account when
calculating artist associations, and the likelihood factor is the lowest bound
of a confidence interval. Everything is statistically significant. Results are
real, yo. \----

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wenderen
There's also tastekid.com for recommendations in general. It does a very good
job with musical artist recommendations in particular.

I searched "Don Caballero" on ifyoudig [1] and got a few good results, but
also some very different artists, like Mogwai and Aphex Twin.

[1] [http://ifyoudig.net/don-caballero](http://ifyoudig.net/don-caballero)

~~~
crntaylor
It's not trying to recommend similar artists - it's recommending artists that
you will like!

I think Mogwai and Aphex Twin are pretty good recommendations for someone who
likes the math rock/post rock that Don Cab play.

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simias
The error message in an "alert" box when you don't select the artist form the
drop down list is a bit surprising.

~~~
gmjoe
Thanks, you're right. That is now #1 on my to-do list -- maybe just go
straight to the artist page if there's an exact string match, or else try to
suggest a list of closely-spelled artists?

Any algorithms anyone can suggest for finding close spellings, besides
Levenshtein? Like, that are somehow indexable or easy to implement in a
database?

[Edit: just updated it, searching now works on a direct string match, no more
annoying alert box.]

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powrtoch
This is really cool. I'd love to see it calculate not just likelihoods but
actual probabilities.

Right now I can see that liking Artist A makes me 10x more likely to like
Artist B. But Artist B might still be really terrible, so it might work out to
only a 1% chance I'll actually like Artist B.

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grimtrigger
This and other music recommendation services tend to have a problem where if
you try a popular artist, it will only return popular artists. I'd really like
a service that you input popular artists and then it returns more obscure
artists with similar influences.

~~~
anonymoushn
Pandora does this. A nice way to make money as a relatively obscure artist on
Pandora is to be acoustically "adjacent" to some extremely popular band.

ifyoudig.net seems to have a very small popularity bias compared to e.g.
Spotify though, so that's nice.

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earlz
This is awesome. Typed in one of my favorite bands, found new bands I actually
like so far. When I do that on Spotify, I get a bunch of crap that every
service counts as "similar", but I hate, or bands I've already heard of a
million times.

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bonsai
One of the best sites I have visited recently.

Remarkable recommendations. My favorite artist is [http://ifyoudig.net/mike-
oldfield](http://ifyoudig.net/mike-oldfield) and actually ifyoudig.net
recommended some really interesting bands.

Way the go!

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venticco
Finding opposite for 'Justin Bieber' is like dividing by 0 - infinity.

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duffdevice
love it, very useful. my only suggestion is to accept an artist name if I type
in the whole thing (rather than forcing me to select from the dropdown)

~~~
desouzt
I'd echo these comments exactly.

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ldonley
Wow this is really good, its funny I was literally just looking for a music
similarity website since last.fm isn't very good and this nails it.

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aram
I like the simple, no-framework approach to the UI.

Sometimes it works much better than stuff you get with
bootstrap/UIkit/Foundation/whatever.

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svimma23
Sometimes for country genre the songs didn't match the artist FYI

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themodelplumber
Jamiroquai but no Incognito? How do these people sleep at night? ;-)

~~~
kristopolous
It took me 7 tries before it found an edm group I asked it. LTJ Bukem and
Dillinja don't make the cut.

These services are clever, but I usually know all of their suggestions. :-(

And yes, I'm trying to do better.

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tgb
I'd love more details on this. Where is the data coming from?

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Bsharp
Awesome site! I'll definitely be coming back often.

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Raphmedia
Nice, I like it.

Need any help on the front-end side of things?

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hmsimha
This would definitely benefit from a .it tld

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desouzt
Great site, great execution. I dig.

