Software Helps Musicians and Fans Find Each Other

Daryl Scairiot is a singer-songwriter from Santa Rosa, Calif., who has never had a record contract, which is why you probably have never heard of him.

There are no advertising campaigns for Scairiot, no posters at the shopping mall, no appearances on “The Tonight Show With Jay Leno.”

And on the Internet, Scairiot’s haunting country tunes are lost in a crowd of songs being given away by obscure artists trying to attract a following.

“It still puts you in a position of having to launch a gigantic marketing campaign in order to get a sizable number of people to notice you,” he said in a recent interview.

But technology is giving musicians such as Scairiot another, more efficient way to find their audiences. New software pushes independent artists’ songs through the Internet to the people with matching tastes, exposing their music to the people most likely to become fans.

One example is Change.TV Inc.’s Indy, a program that downloads songs to users’ computers based on how they rate the tracks they receive. Another is IRate radio, a similar program being developed collaboratively online.

Their approach recalls the “push” craze from the 1990s, led by PointCast, which pushed personalized news programs to customers through the Internet. PointCast was a hot commodity for a few years, only to be felled by slow delivery and management problems.

The new crop has at least two notable advantages over its predecessors: faster Internet connections for its users and more powerful technology for tailoring programs to the audience.

Indy and IRate start by downloading to their users’ computers a number of songs that artists have agreed to distribute for free online. Each time the programs run, they download more songs for users to play and rate on a scale from one to five stars.

The ratings help the software match each user to others who have parallel likes and dislikes. Once a match has been made, the software sends people songs that others with similar tastes have rated highly.

This process, called collaborative filtering, “is really a very human thing,” said Ian Clarke, chief technology officer of Change.TV. “It’s not some magic computer deciding what people are going to like. It’s an intelligent way to identify people who have similar tastes to the tastes you have and suggesting things to you that those people like.”

For example, Indy might send Scairiot’s “Love of Falling Men” to users who give a high rating to other country or folk tunes. Users who want to hear more by an artist can click on the Indy player, and it will take them to the website that provided the track.

The Indy software, found at indy.tv, is like a radio that takes no requests. Users cannot tell it what to play; instead, the software queues up all the songs a user has not yet rated. It repeats tracks only if it runs out of unrated songs to play. And if a song gets only one star, the software cuts off the playback and drops the track from its playlist.

A noncommercial venture, Indy is not trying to compete with other popular programs for playing MP3s on a computer, such as Apple Computer Inc.’s iTunes, Clarke said.

“The goal of Indy is to allow you to discover new music,” he said, adding, “Once you’ve already found the music, you should use something like iTunes or Winamp or Windows Media Player to play it.”

In that sense, he said, Indy is a search engine with a twist.

“The thing about Google is: You want to find R.E.M., you type ‘R.E.M.,’ you get R.E.M.,” Clarke said. “But what if you’re looking for a good artist but you don’t know their name yet? There is no way to search for them.”

Clarke is best known as the developer of Freenet, a peer-to-peer network that provides anonymous, secure sharing of files. Although it was designed to help the authors of controversial works escape censorship, Freenet also may be used for the same kind of piracy that runs rampant on Kazaa, eDonkey and other popular file-sharing networks.

The main similarity between Indy and Freenet is that they both benefit from the “network effect” -- that is, they improve as the number of users grows. As Indy gains users, it compiles a larger pool of ratings, leading to better matches between artists and listeners.

“Indy is in its very early stages,” Clarke said in late May, about a month after the software was released. “We have almost 200,000 ratings of music. We’ve got about 10,000 pieces of [music], and we’ve got about 15,000 users. All of those numbers are growing pretty rapidly.”

The other program, IRate -- at irate.sourceforge.net -- is a bit further along, claiming to have about 50,000 tracks in its catalog. By comparison, most online music stores have more than 1 million tracks, and file-sharing networks offer about 25 million songs.

Scairiot remains skeptical about the Internet’s effect on his career. After all, after eight or 10 years as a musician, he still has to wait tables in Santa Rosa to pay his bills.

The most effective promotional technique, he said, has been to make friends with bands that have large followings, then perform at their shows. He also gives away CDs with samples of his music at other bands’ concerts and at record stores, “the ones that will let me put them on the counter.”

“The Internet, here and there, definitely helped me reach people whom I wouldn’t otherwise,” he said, citing a “growing number of Internet radio stations and online magazines in the Netherlands who keep hitting me up for submissions.”

But Scairiot added, “It’s so dispersed that the frustrating thing about that is I’m still not going to fill a club when I go to those towns.”

Still, Clarke said, obscure artists like Scairiot have a problem that Indy is particularly good at solving.

“The big problem that independent musicians have in terms of getting their work out there is simply: How do people know to even look for their work?” Clarke said. “And that is the problem that we try to solve with Indy. We hope to be Google for media that people don’t even know yet they’re going to like.”