While a vast amount of editorial metadata is being actively
gathered and used by music collectors and enthusiasts, it
is often neglected by music information retrieval and musicology
researchers. In this paper we propose to explore
Discogs, one of the largest databases of such data available
in the public domain. Our main goal is to show how largescale
analysis of its editorial metadata can raise questions
and serve as a tool for musicological research on a number
of example studies. The ...
While a vast amount of editorial metadata is being actively
gathered and used by music collectors and enthusiasts, it
is often neglected by music information retrieval and musicology
researchers. In this paper we propose to explore
Discogs, one of the largest databases of such data available
in the public domain. Our main goal is to show how largescale
analysis of its editorial metadata can raise questions
and serve as a tool for musicological research on a number
of example studies. The metadata that we use describes
music releases, such as albums or EPs. It includes information
about artists, tracks and their durations, genre and
style, format (such as vinyl, CD, or digital files), year and
country of each release. Using this data we study correlations
between different genre and style labels, assess their
specificity and analyze typical track durations. We estimate
trends in prevalence of different genres, styles, and
formats across different time periods. In our analysis of
styles we use electronic music as an example. Our contribution
also includes the tools we developed for our analysis
and the generated datasets that can be re-used by MIR
researchers and musicologists.
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