Consumer-to-Consumer Sharing of Playlists
I’m at the Berkman Center’s lunch talk with Derek Slater about his collaborative research on playlists and consumer-to-consumer recommendation systems.
Known for the blog A Copyfighter’s Musings, Derek has the distinction of being the first undergraduate at Harvard College to be a Berkman Fellow. He’s graduating very soon, so this presentation is his last hurrah.
He did the research (.pdf) with Gartner researcher and Berkman Center collaborator Mike McGuire. Their findings indicate people often use playlists to listen to digital music instead of listening to a digitized CD in its entirety. To many of these people, sharing playlists is extremely important. They not only often like to share the music they like, but they like to hear what others like, too, in order to learn about new music. Their findings have a number of implications for business models.
As I was sitting here thinking about how a playlist model might work with book readers, Derek happened to mention it. Could a library employ something like playlist software so customers could discuss books and make recommendations to each other? Members of the book group I’m in would love this kind of thing. We could then also have a playlist of everything we’ve read during the last five years and perhaps provide some information about each book.
Blogs are one way to do something like playlists and recommendations. By reading j’s scratchpad, you get an idea of things I’ve learned about and perhaps whether or why I find them valuable.
Derek, of course, has a blog post about the work.
Rebecca MacKinnon mentioned how music recommendations from trusted people could sell music and CDs better than looking at the playlist of a complete stranger.
