Since his initial introduction to analog photography four years ago, Cary Fagan, the Houston-based filmmaker, photographer, and artist, has been on a steady ascent. He shot the cover for rapper A$AP Rocky’s 2018 album, Testing (which landed on Billboard’s top twenty album covers of the year), and collaborated with hometown hero Solange Knowles on for her acclaimed When I Get Home project earlier this year, shooting the visuals for Knowles’s BlackPlanet website aesthetic, the inside artwork of the When I Get Home album booklet, and VHS videos playing alongside tunes from the album.

This year, Fagan also garnered international acclaim for his distinctive sculptures of stacked chairs, scoring two international residencies to exhibit them in Japan and Italy. On top of his artistic pursuits, he’s also been pursuing abrowse an online catalog of pre-recorded music, select a song or collection of songs (“album”), and purchase the song or album for shipment direct to the consumer. In this context, online merchants and others desire to assist the consumer in making a purchase selection and desire to suggest possible selections for purchase. However, current classification systems and search and retrieval systems are inadequate for these tasks.
A variety of inadequate classification and search approaches are now used. In one approach, a consumer selects a musical composition for listening or for purchase based on past positive experience with the same artist or with similar music. This approach has a significant disadvantage in that it involves guessing because the consumer has no familiarity with the musical composition that is selected.
In another