Music Information Technology and Professional Stakeholder Audiences: Mind the Adoption Gap

The academic discipline focusing on the processing and organization of digital music information, commonly known as Music Information Retrieval (MIR), has multidisciplinary roots and interests. Thus, MIR technologies have the potential to have impact across disciplinary boundaries and to enhance the handling of music information in many different user communities. However, in practice, many MIR research agenda items appear to have a hard time leaving the lab in order to be widely adopted by their intended audiences. On one hand, this is because the MIR field still is relatively young, and technologies therefore need to mature. On the other hand, there may be deeper, more fundamental challenges with regard to the user audience. In this contribution, we discuss MIR technology adoption issues that were experienced with professional music stakeholders in audio mixing, performance, musicology and sales industry. Many of these stakeholders have mindsets and priorities that differ considerably from those of most MIR academics, influencing their reception of new MIR technology. We mention the major observed differences and their backgrounds, and argue that these are essential to be taken into account to allow for truly successful cross-disciplinary collaboration and technology adoption in MIR. 1998 ACM Subject Classification H.5.5 Sound and Music Computing, J.5 Arts and Humanities– Music, Performing arts, K.4.3 Organizational Impacts, H.3.7 Digital Libraries–User issues