“MediaUnbound solves the problem that there’s too much stuff on the Internet for people to know about it all,” Dorfman says.

The group discovered how to personalize a set of recommendations from seemingly limitless lists of songs by combining computer methods with the expertise of a number of music analysts.

On a typical day, music analyst Alex Helsinger ’98-’00 says, he spends his time expanding obscure playlists, like the hardcore ska list.

Helsinger is one of 10 MediaUnbound employees whose job is to know everything about popular music from its inception to the present day, he says.

Without these music analysts, “the purely technological is too predictable, you miss the excitement of how people relate to music––the mystery part,” Helsinger adds.

MediaUnbound’s group of employees comes nearly exclusively from the ranks of WHRB.

“What we looked for was people who know what makes people tick. And that’s basically what people at WHRB were doing already,” Papish says.

One of their early recruits, for example, is Matthew D. Pakulski ’94, who began performing in a punk rock band during his undergraduate years in Dunster House and owned a record company for a few years after graduation.

“College radio DJ’s are all up on obscure musice,” Helsinger says. “Our ultimate goal is to create a virtual college DJ.”

MediaUnbound

At the start, Helsinger says, the students worked to discover the reason people love particular songs and often arrived at a surprising set of associations.

For instance, says analyst Joshua Mann ’00, fans of alternative musician Beck tend to appreciate Prince.

“[Beck’s] whole popular image is derived from Prince,” Mann says. “We found that given exposure to both artists, people tend to like both. And they’re usually surprised by it.”

For the moment, Dorfman says, MediaUnbound leads the competition in personalization. Its competitors rely on computer algorithms, which are much less accurate.