Warner Music Group wants to hire Bayesians!

For reals!

They’re hiring an Operations Research Optimization Scientist and a Vice President Data Science, who will:

• Instantiate & Productionize a suite of enterprise level models and applications that service the global WMG business. In particular: data pipelines, production-ready models for forecasting, API interfaces for UI/UX
• Lead expertise in productionization of a Bayesian predicting suite and in Bayesian model workflow.
• Hands-on assist with business facing imperatives: ad hoc research requests, statistical models and knowledge
reporting.

See here for further background. I can’t confirm that if you take this job you’ll get to meet the members of Nickelback, but I can’t confirm that this won’t happen either.

12 thoughts on “Warner Music Group wants to hire Bayesians!

    • The music business doesn’t work that way: it’s not about musical quality, it’s about speaking to the audience. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing: I’ve been doing music for over 65 years now but popular music hasn’t spoken to me since 1972 or so. They don’t need me, they need people who can relate to (or can use Prof. G’s Magical Statistical Goo to figure out how to relate to) today’s youth.

  1. Interesting. Clicked on the link to see if there was any details of what exactly the models are going to be. There were no details. In any case, it’s worth pointing out that there has been an exponential growth of bands/DJs since the 90s. The result is that the sampling algorithms that are used to give the likely distribution to predict what further music a listener would like often don’t work. The reason is that the number of listeners are so small, and the number of categories of music are now so varied and complex, it’s difficult to predict what a listener will like.

    (This is often referred to as the “Napolean Dynamite” problem, based on the problem of predicting what viewers who like the movie would also like. It’s a good introduction to the formal mathematical approaches to addressing the problem.)

    Also worth pointing out:

    * Warner Music is owned by Russian oligarch Len Blavatnik, presumably a close friend of Putin.

    * As someone who has spent almost his entire adult life either at a university or in Silicon Valley, I find anyone associated with the entertainment industry to be either bizarre or unbearably annoying.

    * Los Angeles is one of the worst cities, anywhere in the world, I’ve visited.

  2. I did not expect you to be Nickelback’s hater :/ That’s not nice, Andrew. Not nice.

    Actually, I think I heard sounds “of Photograph” coming from Room 1016 SSW…

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