Kato is our digital record store assistant - a model that connects DJs with the music they’re looking for.
The first version of the model looked at record label similarities. It’s a natural fit for us as a company because we’ve always been big supporters of record labels as a vital part of the industry. A big part of our mission is to empower labels. And it works well as a recommendation model too. Following labels you like is a great way to find new music.
But a lot of people don’t think of music in terms of record labels. We’ve heard that feedback a number of times, and that’s what inspired v2 of the Kato model which added artist awareness. Rather than just searching by label, you can now search by artist, and see the labels your favourite artists release on. It helped connect things together and made the model smarter.
Version 3 adds genres.
Genres are a blunt instrument. Useful for conversation, useful for navigation, but not great at capturing what someone actually listens to. And a massive can of worms when it comes to naming, and what different people mean when they say genre names. But they provide useful guides and groupings.
Kato now uses about 100 genre signals alongside label and artist data to find clusters of music taste.
Take a DJ who’s into Hard Techno and also the chilled side of Hip Hop. That doesn’t mean their taste is in the middle of those two styles. They’re two separate things, and Kato v3 treats them as two distinct clusters. The old approach would have averaged those together and recommended music that sat between both. Version 3 doesn’t do that. It understands that people have varied tastes and hence, makes better recommendations.
We’ve also added new pages to the recipient dashboard, including a new my taste page and a genre explorer graph, so you can see how different areas of music connect and move around them more easily. And there’s a Play Mode for genres too, which makes it easier to stay up to date with new releases.
Promo still has a noise problem. DJs get too much music that’s not right for them. Better matching is one of the main places to fix that, for labels and for DJs. Labels find the right audience, and for DJs, the inbox actually starts to feel worth checking again.
We’re moving fast on this. More coming.