ASYLUM

* Assholes

Fuck you, Norway!

Fuck you, JP Morgan!

Fuck you all!

* The Machine Has Spoken! OBEY THE MACHINE!

This is a short article on a program callled HSS (for "Hit Song Science") from a company called Polyphonic HMI:

From unsigned acts dreaming in their garage, to multinationals such as Sony and Universal, everyone is clandestinely using a new and controversial technology to gain an edge on their competitors [...] a piece of software that can "predict" the chance of a track being a hit or a miss. — Guardian article

The article suggests that it might not homogenise the music industry because, by 'guaranteeing' hits, it would allow them to take greater risks. I see three problems with this:

• the industry is already homogenised like milk.

• as they point out (and then promptly gloss over) in the article, the software can only look to the past. It can't predict innovative work.

• the execs might be sold on it for the wrong reasons. "The fact that 95% of hit songs in the past 50 years are high scorers seems to back him up" — well, duh. The software is basically a huge statistical database of, er, hit songs from the past 50 years. So yes, if you feed those same songs back into it, it's going to find a match. Thank you, please drive through.