"A default 'my music collection' playlist that intuited what kind of things you actually wanted to carry around with you (with whatever obscure algorithm it used) would probably be quite appealing to some people..."
Tell me about it Tom.
Tom Coates naval-gazes his music grazing habits and shares his iTunes Smart Playlists with us. What's interesting here (to me, anyway) is his focus on utility. I've done lots of thinking about different facets of the information around music, in terms of organising around a richer set of values than artist or genre - in fact, I wrote a big ol' post on the subject and picked out some extra facets. And yet I forgot this most basic aspect, until Paul Schütze picked it up in a comment addition to my post.
Utility. In one of Tom's playlists, it's basically setting up 'music for running' (though not particularly precisely). It could be praying, sleeping, reading, learning, dancing, sex, whatever. It's what Amazon's listmania mechanism effortlessly allows too. It'd be great to see iTunes expand its set of criteria - I guess the relatively adaptive design of the smart playlist means you could abuse the genre tag to create lists around particular themes ... But I wonder if Apple does have plans to allow more complex organisation?
When I posted on iTunes 3's release, Ben from Magnetbox commented that only a tiny percentage of people would bother to type in contextual tags for their whole mp3 collection. I basically agree, but ... well, Tom and I are no doubt entirely unrepresentative, but I wouldn't be too sure that it'll always be a tiny percentage. As Tom points out, it's the new alphabetizing your record collection! Catch the wave! Moreover, as Brian Eno has pointed out, being an archivist is the key musical attribute of our time (me paraphrasing, probably wrongly).
However, one could imagine that a way to just download a bunch of rich contextual information around your collection would almost be worth paying for (oh, not really paying for, natch). Somehow submit your iTunes catalogue to a service which then sent it back adorned and contextualised with all kinds of faceted metadata (date recorded; city most identified with; trumpet is principal instrument; ideal for anaerobic exercising; rhythm is 3/4; drummer played with Coltrane; rapper attended art school; producer employed Oblique Strategies during recording process; ideal for soundtracking 'deserted city' flicks; etc.). Ideally, collated and validated the distributed emergent interbrain of course.
As I rashly posted in a discussion at work the other day, what are DJs but metadata?
