I was talking with the folks over at FineTune today, and they have just implemented a new community feature that gives personal recommendations for music, playlists, and other users.

When I went to check out my recommendations, I was expecting to find some death metal that I hadn’t heard of, so I was pretty surprised to find out that FineTune thinks that I’m into Aretha Franklin. Don’t get me wrong, Aretha is fine and all, but since I wouldn’t put her in my the top 50, I contacted the folks over at FineTune to see if they could shed some light on what might be going on.

Here’s what I found out:

The Finetune community system makes recommendations by keying off the information in your profile fingerprint. Don’t know what your profile fingerprint is? Neither did I, and I’ve been deleting artists out of it for months. According to FineTune, your fingerprint is the key list of artists from which your recommendations are formed. The Fingerprint is based on three things:

• Your favorite artists,
• Artists in your playlists, and
• Artists that are related to the artists in your favorites and playlists.

When I looked at my playlists, I found that most of them are filled with oddities from all the random Finetune Friday themes over the last six months. When I looked at my favorite artists, I hadn’t added a single one. Not even Slayer. Since there is no clairvoyance engine built into the FineTune application, it’s really no surprise that it had no idea that I was looking for metal if I hadn’t put any into the system.

In the hopes of steering my recommendations toward the darker side of metal, I went in and clicked “I’m a Fan” next to artists I liked. 44 artists later, FineTune still recommended Aretha. I hung my head in shame and went back to the folks at FineTune to find out why the system was mistaking my Viking God of Metal fur for a chinchilla wrap.

I found out that the system is an evolutionary baby step in Finetune’s community features and it isn’t currently updated in real time. The recommendation engine constantly crawls through the half million users recrunching recommendations, which means that it can take some time for changes to be updated. FineTune admits that this isn’t ideal, but they are moving toward getting the recommendations working in real time in a future update.

While I wait, I’m clinging only to a thread of hope that the system may already think that I’m a Viking Metal God and just hasn’t gotten around to telling me yet.

To get recommendations for your account, check your FineTune profile for this:

I’d be interested to hear if you have better luck.

Posted in Music