Digital

Trent Reznor working on new streaming service with Beats

By | Published on Tuesday 11 December 2012

Trent Reznor

Trent Reznor revealed earlier this year that he had begun working with Dr Dre and Jimmy Iovine’s Beats company on a number of undisclosed projects. One of those projects, he tells the latest edition of The New Yorker, is a new streaming service, currently going by the name of Daisy.

As previously reported, HTC-backed Beats Electronics bought existing US-based streaming service MOG in July this year, and it’s now assumed that platform will provide the basic framework of Daisy, which might explain the recent departure of original MOG CEO David Hyman from the company.

But there are loads of streaming services out there, what exactly does Daisy do? Well, explains Reznor: “[It] uses mathematics to offer suggestions to the listener [and will also] present choices based partly on suggestions made by connoisseurs, making it a platform in which the machine and the human would collide more intimately. [In the case of Spotify, you have] sixteen million licensed pieces of music … but you’re not stumbling into anything. What’s missing is a service that adds a layer of intelligent curation. That first wave of music presentation which felt magical, the one where the songs are chosen by algorithms that know who you listened to, has begun to feel synthetic”.

Actually, that weakness is exactly what Spotify’s recently announced update hopes to combat (and one that others are already working on), so it will be interesting to see how Daisy squares up to the same challenge when it is eventually launched.



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