Korn's Profile

Really valid point on the purpose of music creation. I think for this particular article, and thus my extrapolation of it, we’re looking at the commercialization and business success of music, rather than the aesthetics of the song. However, I totally agree with you that for the artists/composers/musicians, their goals are definitely different from the companies’. I wonder how NPL or other tools could analyze emotions of the singers, and what proxies could we use to represents those aspects of what constitute as a ‘happy’ sound vs ‘sad’ sounds. (ratio of majors to minors chords?)

This is a great initiative indeed. Totally agree that visualizing the effect and showing the non-analytics people the current situation is definitely a good starting point. Data-backed arguments are stronger and carries greater weight in conversations, at the same time, visualization helps people see the clearing picture as well as the magnitude of the situation. It also caters to the human nature that prefers pictures over texts, which is why infographic posts perform so much better in conveying information than plain text.

Though I wonder, for initiatives like these, is it possible for the efforts to be bottom-up rather than top-down? What would it take to have employees raise the issues and result in measurable action with tangible impacts, instead of waiting for the c-level executive to start a company-wide initiative?

That’s super fascinating! Isn’t it bizarre how many sources of data the music industry could utilize to ‘shape’ the scene and our likings? Also, the point regarding the network effect is super valid. These days, music distribution depends on more than just a good song, but so many other components, which their impacts are definitely amplified by the network effect.

Great point! Also, given that a ‘hit’ or the ‘next big thing’ no longer limits to just the musical output, but also music videos, and tons of other factors, how much could the analysis be of help in identifying them vs does human gut instinct still have certain unexplainable advantage over this? Also, the behavior of the mainstream consumers changes at the rate that it wasn’t before, which makes predicting or even following the trend even harder.

Interesting topic! Definitely agree with the considerations you brought up regarding how firms should ago about when tackling the issue of people’s sentiments. I think beyond validity of the analysis, one potential problem is the biased baked into the algorithm that generate the output in the analysis. As we’ve seen with many cases from the class, the algorithm is as biased as the ones who make them. Thus, without knowing which variables go into the algorithm and how bias-resistant these variables are, the results might actually become meaningless.

One more thought on data gathering part. As we’ve discussed throughout the course, can people opt-out of being a test subject for this? It’s just concerning that all of your conversations with the managers are potentially recorded. Without knowing exactly how the data would be used or even stored makes me even more skeptical about this approach.

I totally agree with your concerns regarding privacy issues, and potential harms that could arise as a consequence of opting-in (and even opting-out) to the program. Personally, I feel like the program was created out of good intentions to promote ‘better’ wellbeing of individuals which is correlated with how much sleep they get. However, the way that the program was executed concerns me, especially, the leaderboard, as the goal of the program is to get people to their personal goal, not a collective goal. I would not feel motivated to sleep more if I’m content with the hours I got, yet the position on the leaderboard could nudge some competitive nature in people such they sleep more than the amount needed to function well for the day.

One way I thought would make this better would be to just have email reports on a 2-3 days basis updating the participants progress, and have some way of saying that x% of people in the team are reaching their goals, such that they don’t feel pressured all the time with a live scoreboard.