The Future of Music Discovery: Search vs. Generation

<h1>Why this Question Matters</h1> Around ten years ago, music streaming services were competing heavily for the best music recommendation system. Clearly, a flawless recommendation system would provide the user with the exact piece of music that optimally satisfies their needs, every time. However, some people view recommendation systems as transitional technology. Ultimately, no matter the size of your music catalog, there can’t be a perfect fit available for each possible user request. Modern generative AI systems could potentially solve this problem by generating music that is (robot) hand-tailored to each request. On the other hand, these generative systems are still not producing high-quality music, have tremendous computational costs, and are subject to complex ethical and legal concerns. Therefore, this article aims to compare the benefits & limitations of search-based music retrieval and music generation to find out whether we should expect generative systems to fully replace, augment, or not even affect the current solutions. Before we start, let’s define what we mean by a “search algorithm” and a “generative model”. <a href="https://towardsdatascience.com/the-future-of-music-discovery-search-vs-generation-4d565a08515e">Website</a>