Opinion: Idiot Genius?

One of the most interesting features of iTunes is its Genius feature. Starting with music, and since its inception expanding to video and iPhone applications, it takes a song, or the contents of your library, and suggests other things that you might like, in the form of Genius Mixes, or recommended buys. In a recent upgrade to the application, Genius even creates “radio stations” of your music, grouping similar songs together for uninterrupted, flowing listening. This, for me at least, works great. However, every now and then, something comes up that makes me question how smart my Genius really is.

I have a lot of music in my library. More than 60 GB. And so, I can’t really keep track of what kind of music is what all the time, and Genius does that for me. I recently discovered a new Canadian folk duo, Dala, and decided to hear more music in their vein. I popped one of their songs into the Genius Mix, and was surprised to see, despite their relative obscurity, that I had a nice 50 song list to listen to. And listen to it I did. I heard some Leonard Cohen, some Rufus Wainwright, some New Pornographers, some Sarah McLachlan… I suddenly realized something. Musical genre aside, every performer or band I had heard so far was Canadian. I looked through the rest of the list, and, sure enough, 42 out of the 50 suggested songs were by Canadian artists. Did iTunes think Canada was a genre?

I was at once confused and impressed. How did the program even know the provenance of the band? There isn’t, as far as I’m aware, a “Country of Origin” blank in the mp3 metadata. Assuming that the information is gotten from the iTunes music store, then why would it choose a country over the mood, or the genre? This got me to wondering whether this was intentional or not. Perhaps, apart from being Canadian, all Canadian bands have similar styles. I had to admit that the mix was flowing pretty well.

But what I think I’d like to see here is something like what Pandora does. “We’re playing this song because it shares THIS with your chosen song.” Whether the shared feature is mellow guitar, close harmony, or Canadian citizenship, I’d like to know. It doesn’t simply choose the stated genre (with some exceptions, my brother once had a playlist of poems after selecting a Led Zeppelin song mistakenly labeled as “Spoken Word”), so I’d be interested in knowing its algorithm. iTunes could be much more interesting if it gave a little bit more away about its Genius. After all, you never know when you might actively want to listen to a playlist of purely Scottish bands.

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