Music Machinery

Quite the opposite. The journalist idea of "Anonymous" is very different from the insider idea of Anonymous. In the simplest terms, Anonymous is anyone, really. It's not limited to 4chan users (there are other chans, and the users sometimes overlap). 4chan itself is just a convenient place to recruit people to perform an attack and later use as a scapegoat.

As an example, the anti-Scientology protests were reported under the catch-all banner of Anonymous, but the people organizing it and hitting the streets were also from rival forums such as Something Awful. Funny enough, the protest movement is completely different from (and at odds with) the original catalyst: other Anons DDoSing Scientology websites for using the DMCA to take down a video on YouTube. As someone mentioned earlier in the comments, one core motivation is trolling, or "lulz," so under this so-large-its-useless umbrella term "Anonymous," there are groups sabotaging one another just because it's funny.

The core people organizing* these DDoS attacks come and go, but they are a dedicated few who have the time and skills to design such programs to distribute to the masses. As in the Time magazine hack, it was respectably sophisticated (this article does it justice: http://musicmachinery.com/2009/04/15/inside-the-precision-hack). And yes, this core group does have botnets, as well as excellent social engineering skills to motivate *channers to download and execute their software.

I love watching people and…

A lot of this discussion makes more sense if you know the history of The Echo Nest and their acquisition by Spotify.

The Echo Nest was one of the most interesting music-tech companies ever built: a music intelligence platform spun out of MIT that analyzed audio, metadata, web text, artist similarity, genre structure, and playlist construction. Spotify bought them in 2014 specifically to strengthen music discovery and recommendation. At the time, Spotify said the deal would let it use The Echo Nest's "in depth musical understanding and tools for curation", and even said the Echo Nest API would remain "free and open" for developers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Echo_Nest

https://news.cision.com/spotify/r/spotify-acquires-the-echo-nest%2Cc9547435

If you ever used the old Echo Nest APIs, Remix SDK, demos, Music Hack Day projects, or Paul Lamere's experiments, that was a golden era. Echo Nest had open APIs for artist similarity, track analysis, playlisting, "taste profiles", ID mapping across services, and beat/segment-level music analysis. Paul Lamere's whole ecosystem of demos came out of that world: Boil the Frog, Sort Your Music, Organize Your Music, playlistminer, and later Smarter Playlists. His GitHub still points to a lot of that lineage, and his blog is still active. In fact, he posted just this month about rebuilding Smarter Playlists after ten years of use.

https://github.com/plamere

https://musicmachinery.com/

The sad part is that the open developer…

Reminds me of a cool hackathon project I saw a few years ago, The Infinite Jukebox. It finds pairs of beats in a song that sound alike and during playback has a chance at each beat with of jumping to its paired match, creating a seamlessly looped version of the song with added novelty from verses and choruses having varying order and length.

The original hack, done on song that works particularly well, is still up: http://infinitegangnamstyle.playlistmachinery.com

The playback code often gets stuck looping the first beat when loaded for the first time or when the tab loses focus, which is fixed by reloading.

It works quite well on songs with repetitive elements and instrumentation divided cleanly between beats. The original site for submitting arbitrary songs is broken, but a fork is hosted by someone else. Here with an instrumental piece it works well on: https://eternalbox.dev/jukebox_go.html?id=1LaCW0R8Q7oIY3tKtDgZOw

An interesting series of posts on the creator's blog explains it works, how it interacts with the structure of pop songs, and how the parameters can be tuned for individual tracks.[1] And it's open source,[2] though the beat splitting is based on an API from (a company since purchased by) Spotify. It seems that once the initial processing is complete, the playback is purely client-side; this is probably why snapshots of the site at archive.org are fully functional, quite remarkably for such interactive content.[3]

There's also a variant where one…

I am quite interested in this topic. There is some research on that field. Some links I collected in the past:

http://thesis.flyingpudding.com/

http://dynampd.ubitux.fr/

http://erikbern.com/2015/09/22/presentations-about-spotify-music-recommendations/

http://erikbern.com/2015/09/24/nearest-neighbor-methods-vector-models-part-1/

http://www.wired.com/underwire/2013/08/qq_netflix-algorithm/

http://www.slideshare.net/erikbern/collaborative-filtering-at-spotify-16182818

http://benanne.github.io/2014/08/05/spotify-cnns.html https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8137264

http://www.playdar.org/ https://github.com/RJ/playdar-core http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3876724

https://github.com/bmcfee/librosa

http://forever.fm/ http://blog.petersobot.com/introducing-forever-fm

http://musicmachinery.com/2011/05/14/how-good-is-googles-instant-mix/

http://musicmachinery.com/2012/11/12/the-infinite-jukebox/

Btw., as I am developing my own music player, my main important feature/goal is a kind of automatic DJ which automatically selects music and I also especially had a discover mode in mind. However, that main feature did not evolve that much so far because there were so much other things to implement first. For now, it only supports access to files in your file system, and it looks on tags and artist and adds quite some randomness to it.

https://github.com/albertz/music-player/blob/master/WhatIsAMusicPlayer.md#intelligent-automatic-queue

The closest thing to a documented case I've seen is a report of people gaming the Time Person of the Year poll so that the top person was moot, and the first letters of the candidates spelt out "Marblecake. Also the game.":

By understanding how reCAPTCHA worked – the team was able to double their productivity (since they usually only had to enter one word instead of two). To further optimize their voting they created a poll front-end that allowed you to enter votes quickly while giving you an update of the poll status (and since it is a 4chan kind of crowd, they also provided the option to stream some porn just to keep you company while you are subverting one of the largest media companies in the world.

https://musicmachinery.com/2009/04/27/moot-wins-time-inc-loses/

However, this is slightly different as people were deliberately solving CAPTCHAs (and watching porn) rather than wanting to watch porn and also incidentally solving CAPTCHAs that they had no direct interest in.

Indeed.

The author is referring to the up-a-half-step modulation that Barry Manilow tactically used all over the place.

I call it a "Manilow".

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But yeah, it's just one of the many elements of musical craft that's missing in today's popular music.

Sampled sounds are (by definition) lifeless.

Sequenced rhythm tracks are unnaturally consistent.

See Paul Lamere's "In search of the click track":
https://musicmachinery.com/2009/03/02/in-search-of-the-click-track/

A lack of rhythmic variation. Consider the folk tradition of wandering from the time signature; Pete Seeger and early Paul Simon for instance. And the Beatles, certainly

Generally a lack of pickup notes, or "anacrusis".

And the lack of an inspirational melody or chord change.

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60's pop music was, I think, a special case because the hit songs had to get noticed and appreciated in a worst-case listening environment; typically a crappy AM radio.