Exploring the music similarity space on the web

This article comprehensively addresses the problem of similarity measurement between music artists via text-based features extracted from Web pages. To this end, we present a thorough evaluation of different term-weighting strategies, normalization methods, aggregation functions, and similarity measurement techniques. In large-scale genre classification experiments carried out on real-world artist collections, we analyze several thousand combinations of settings/parameters that influence the similarity calculation process, and investigate in which way they impact the quality of the similarity estimates. Accurate similarity measures for music are vital for many applications, such as automated playlist generation, music recommender systems, music information systems, or intelligent user interfaces to access music collections by means beyond text-based browsing. Therefore, by exhaustively analyzing the potential of text-based features derived from artist-related Web pages, this article constitutes an important contribution to context-based music information research.