Classifying Music...

The Beatles have a way of keeping Doug Eck up at night. Specifically, the research scientist at Google grapples with one of the core problems of automated music discovery: With a band whose catalog is as evolutionary and nuanced as The Beatles's, how can computers truly understand the artist and recommend relevant music to fans? After all, not everybody who loves A Hard Day's Night necessarily has a soft spot for the weirdest moments on The White Album. For humans, detecting the difference is easy. For machines, it's not so simple.

Solving problems like these resolves only part of a larger, more complex equation at play when Google attempts to help its users discover music.