Daisy ⇥ fistfulayen.com

In a profile in the December 17^th issue of The New Yorker, Trent Reznor revealed his involvement with the Beats brand as a brand new music streaming service codenamed “Daisy”:

Reznor sees Daisy as a second generation of Spotify and Pandora, which rely on mathematics to offer suggestions to the listener. Daisy, however, would present choices based partly on suggestions made by connoisseurs, making it a platform in which the machine and the human would collide more intimately.

It’s vague, but it’s there: it’s hard to guess at what a listener might like and the results often suck, but suggestions from people who love the same music makes for more accurate suggestions, and a happier listener. Everybody wins.

While announcing that he has accepted the CEO position of Daisy, current Ian Rogers — CEO of Topspin — offered this explanation of what makes it different, and what makes it better:

While I use and love many music services today (mostly MOG, Songza, and Pandora in my personal life), the music experience and interface hasn’t evolved all that much. In many ways it seems like we’ve spent the last fifteen years answering the basic question of “how do we make the music available” (the question Napster answered in 1999) and not “how do we find the music we love? the music we want to listen to right now?”

A great observation, and a service like this sounds absolutely necessary. Rolling Stone magazine also reports that Reznor has accepted a chief creative officer position at the company, which is great news: Reznor is not only an exceptionally talented musician, he also understands the evolving relationship of media and technology.