Big Data finding: the number of people who drowned in a pool correlates with the films Nicolas Cage appears in 😃
Big Data is the buzzword in media analysis today. Music streamers such as Spotify and iTunes Music use Big Data to create musical playlists that are supposed to be perfect for you. Netflix suggests TV drama or movies based on what you, and people who are like you, choses to watch. And Facebook puts in advertizing in your news stream based on past behvaior by you and by people in your network.
But, is Big Data the holy grail for market researchers and for radio- and music programmers in particular?
In a book by Tyler Vigen he has fun with fact that truths are not truths just because the research says so. In a new world of Big Data analysis, where computation, based on algorithms, generates recommendations for you, we still need humans that interprets data and to make recommendations. This is well illustrated by lots of unlikely, and sometimes hilarious correlations featured in his book:
- Per capita cheese consumption correlates with the number of people who died tangled in their bed sheets
- Age of Miss America correlates with the number of murders by steam, hot vapours, and hot objects
- People who drowned after falling out of a fishing boat correlates with the marriage rate in Kentucky
You can find more fun examples on his website and in his book available on Amazon.
Putting Vigen's playful data handling aside, we should recognize that Big Data is a great tool to enhance your knowledge about the audience or consumers, but it does not put music- and program curation or traditional research into oblivion. Research is still about talking to real people in surveys, focus groups and face-to-face. And helping people find music to like, podcasts to enjoy or TV drama to watch, is still done best by all the curators out there, such as friends, reviewers, journalists, bloggers, DJ's etc.
Souces: Tyler Vigen, www.tylervigen.com. His book can be found on Amazon, http://www.amazon.com/Spurious-Correlations-Tyler-Vigen/dp/0316339431