Musicplasma, Or What Do Kid Rock and Radiohead Have In Common?
Continuing our examination of ways that Flash is - or is not - usable, we’ve been playing around with a site called Musicplasma. Basically, as others have noted, it’s a search engine/relational database that lets you visualize connections between different bands, or movie stars, or movies, or directors. Type in “Madonna” and you’ll get a the Material Girl centered in a solar system of other musicians, each represented by spheres of different sizes and colors, depending on their popularity. The other bands closest to your entry are those that are supposedly most similar in musical style.
The goal is to provide an easy way to find music or movies, etc., that is similar to a favorite known quanitity. As the folks at Mac Observer noted, it’s a handy tool when coupled with, e.g., iTunes. (Not that iTunes doesn’t do pretty well with text-based suggestions, but this goes further afield.) Given that the makers of the site have linked with Amazon, there’s actually a half decent amount of information present - you can see a list of the most recent albums in the persistent menu that floats at the left of the screen.
In terms of usability, this is a reasonable instantiation of Flash. It would be hard to manifest something as purely visible as this without that application. And the makers of the site have clearly tried to ensure that navigation and functionality are not obscured by the “wow” factor of being able to move around a star system of bands. The menu is fairly intuitive - displaying “help,” “discography” and even a “last maps” feature that echoes the history feature in a browser window. There’s also a way to adjust shading to make renderings “pop” more against the background. All that said, the persistent menu can get in the way, and it’s easy to accidentally cause the map to redraw when you simply want to move around to explore.
As we did with our post on Amazon’s SIPs, we thought we’d experiment with some different mapping exercises to see if anything funny popped up. Naturally, it did. I tried to plug in an fairly random assortment of four artists: Gordon Lightfoot (the smooth-voiced, iconic, seventies Canadian balladeer), Blondie, Kid Rock and Radiohead.
Now, there’s a lot going on in these charts. But the major thing we found amusing was how - if you compare Lightfoot’s chart to Blondie’s chart , Bette Midler shows up on both (big blue sphere). Granted, she’s an outlier - but if the taxonomy of the interface is correct, far more popular than either. And if you look at Kid Rock and then Radiohead, you see…Norah Jones (big purple sphere)! Certainly I, for one, would never have made those particular connections.
In all seriousness, the business question here is whether or not this kind of tool would encourage me to buy music or movies. My opinion? Unlike SIPs and the Concordance at Amazon, musicplasma would accelerate the purchasing decision. I’d like to better understand the basis on which the tool functions (is popularity/sphere size albums sold?), but even so, it’s definitely aided both my iTunes buying and my movie watching.
JF
May 26th, 2005 at 12:59 pm
cool post. i have played around with various version of this interface. what i like about it is the ability to find “related” artists in a visual way. i find that it works best with the more obscure bands. for example, i typically use “Prefab Sprout” a fairly obscure, but distictive sounding brit-folk band. the “recommendations” that are presented based on the other bands — and thier relative location, help to identify other bands that i might like. what is really interesting is the navigation / interaction that allows you to “re-center” the map by selecting another band. so, if i like “Prefab Sprout” i can see related bands — many of which i know. but by selecting one of these bands, like “China Crisis” can see how other bands related to both CC and PS (1 degree of seperation?).
overall, i find the site has limited appeal for a key reason — they offer little information to help you assess the bands. while a discography is great — it does not help you form an opinion or assessment of any new “finds” that you might uncover. this can only be done thru editorial descriptions of the band’s sound or by providing clips to listen to key songs. having to go thu amazon for this content make the site much less useful (to me).
June 5th, 2005 at 1:09 pm
This is an obscure band I saw at Unbiversity of Texas. Still not sure what they are about.