When you think about it, a technological component in a media player can auto-magically beat-sync two tracks by comparing basic structure and determining BPM. Word documents used to be the bane of the structured data movement, because they trapped content in a non-structured format, but ODF and OOXML have changed that game completely, creating a new class of semi-structured data; so why not music or video?

It’s fascinating to consider that if more artists released works under CC-NC by attribution, remix artists could provide additional value by micro-tagging individual samples within the deeper structure of their compositions – particularly if this functionality were baked into the software used to assemble the composition.

In addition, isn’t the original theory behind Pandora based on linking chord progressions and such, or is it more general? I never really got a bead on what Pandora was actually doing.

Also, hang the DJ and all that – I rather enjoyed beat-syncing vinyl, before the robots took over. To quote Johnny Guitar Watson, maybe we do need to strike on computers!