Don’t we already have Spotify, a streaming service with about 20 million users in 17 countries? And didn’t Dr Dre recently make the top of the Forbes list as the highest paid celebrity, beating everyone from Elton John to Simon Cowell and Britney Spears? So why would he need another business venture?
So why Daisy, this new streaming service that will be launched mid-2013 and developed by Dr Dre’s headphones company and Trent Reznor?
I am not sure, but Daisy will be Spotify’s concurrent, and its innovation will be to use human expertise as the Nine Inch Nails frontman explained to the Guardian. In short he wants to put the human touch back in the computer as he thinks ‘music services rely too much on computerized recommendations and there aren't enough human beings advising users what music to buy’… What music to buy? If people are streaming they aren't necessarily buying.
Anyway, even though Spotify offers millions of songs, ‘you're not stumbling into anything’, explained Reznor, ‘What's missing is a service that adds a layer of intelligent curation’.
I see, so there will always be a computer in the middle of all this, but also ‘recommendations from connoisseurs’, and the system will be ‘a platform in which the machine and the human would collide more intimately’,… it sounds like an episode of the Matrix.
Err, last time I saw Trent Reznor talking about the music industry with David Byrne, I had the impression he wasn’t very happy with streaming services like Spotify. Plus Spotify isn’t profitable yet, with a loss of $59.3 millions in 2011, which I don’t exactly understand… Do we need recommendations from people we don’t know? On Spotify, we already have playlists from our friends that we know and trust… But above everything, how is this possible? If they get millions of users, how can there be a human behind every advice? There must be more computer part than human part involved.
At the end, if you are like me, you don’t care about advices, when I go to Spotify, I often listen to a specific artist I have just heard about, but I never follow any recommendations, and I am just plain tired of the numerous emails I received from Youtube, Spotify and all the music mags that recommend me music, I rarely even read them.