Predominant.ly brings unexpected elements to music exploration

Predominant.ly brings unexpected elements to music exploration, making the experience personalized and enjoyable, like accidentally discovering a long forgotten favorite in a second-hand record store.

Do you remember those dull autumn days when you would spend several hours in a record store, browsing the shelves aimlessly and avoiding the rain. You take out an album, just like the other 400 albums you watched that day, but this one, you know, is very special. You don't know this band, or even the type of music they play, but from the cover, you know it will be special. You were electrocuted.

Years later today, 'The Avengers' still holds a special place in your record collection and heart.

We all hope to have a special and unique experience with our music, and we enjoy having 'our' music. Exploration is a big part of it. But when did that happen? In the era of iTunes and Spotify, the main interface of our music looked like spreadsheet applications - they made it unlikely for us to find things that didn't fit our normal music taste, and allowed us to broaden our horizons or expand our music foundation.

We either search for new music (how can you search for things you don't know?) or software algorithms provide useful results, which are often useless or hilarious. The act of discovery makes our music more special to us: what we miss is the excitement of hunting and the feeling of discovery.

When you only have solutions, everything looks like a problem

We have found that people often say that design is only for "solving problems", and this viewpoint sets the threshold quite low, partly because it requires a problem as a prerequisite for designers to create.

We hope to design something that can enhance an experience, go beyond completing a task or solving a problem, and elevate it to an unforgettable encounter that can produce positive or satisfying effects even in the smallest aspects.

More and more of our interactions, whether ordinary or extraordinary, are now conducted through electronic displays. You speak to your mother with the same glowing rectangle, just like you submit your taxes. This makes our experience less obvious. In the era of screens, we may tend to rely on familiar visual language, and designing for its content is becoming increasingly important.

By viewing the experience as independent and unique, we can avoid repeatedly applying the same solution, no matter how well it may run. Through Predominant.ly, we hope to bring unexpected elements back to music search, making this experience as personalized and enjoyable as accidentally discovering a long forgotten favorite in a second-hand record store.

We would like to thank Matthew Butterick for his speech, which reversed the trend of declining expectations and for the first time allowed us to express in language the viewpoint that 'problem-solving is the lowest level of design'

In other color name tables, we use the results of the XKCD color survey (our favorite names). The author of XKCD, Randall Monroe, asked visitors to name RGB colors and ultimately obtained over 5 million different color name pairs from 222000 participants. Thus, he extracted a list of 954 colors that he could track with "considerable accuracy" http://xkcd.com/color/rgb/. The published article does not include the term 'white dove'.

The data itself comes from iTunes, which is one of the largest and well maintained music album databases of its kind in the world. Apple makes the entire metabase available for commercial development through recommended links: if you buy some music you find on this website, we get a small portion (Apple's share, not record companies or artists' share).

Mainly for fun

This website was conceived, designed, and built by Open Work, a team of four designers who explore collaboration models, interactive methods, and the boundaries between content and interface.