We all know that when the robots and computers become self-aware, we are ultimately doomed. Well, we’re one step closer to that existence with new data released by the popular music discovery app Shazam. At the Strata + Hadoop Conference in London this week, Shazam’s Vice President of Product Cait O’Riordan spoke to their near-exact science of proving their app’s predictive abilities.
With 100 million active users, Shazam has so much data to mine that they say they can predict a hit song 33 days away from it climbing the charts and getting regular rotation. They also can tell when a relatively unknown act will explode, like British rock band Clean Bandits, who had the most Shazams in all of 2014. Their research also predicted that Katy Perry’s “Roar” would beat out Lady Gaga’s “Applause,” that Nicki Minaj has the best verse on Kanye West’s “Monster,” and that everyone would love the “baking soda, I got baking soda!” part of O.T. Genasis’ “Coco.” But who wouldn’t, we’re all human.
The video is very interesting in showing how traceable and predictable we all truly are. Also, it’s worth it just to watch this polite English woman talking about “Coco” for a good amount of time. Oh, and watch out for the machines. They’re coming for us.
(Via O’Reilly)
