Electrical engineers at the University of California, San Diego have recently been pitting Apple's Genius music recommender program against their self-proclaimed, new and improved version, which is said to include an ignored sector of music, dubbed the 'long tail', in music recommendations. It's always been well known that radio suffers from a popularity bias, in which the most popular songs receive an inordinate amount of airtime, while less popular, sometimes better music is heard very rarely. In Apple's music recommender system, iTunes' Genius, this bias is magnified.  Genius uses “collaborative filtering” on purchase statistics from iTunes Store- they've sold over 6 billion tracks- in order to help people organize their music and discover songs and artists they've never heard based on similarity to a “seed” song that they have liked in the past. But an underground artist will... --
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