Introduction to Music Similarity and Retrieval

Abstract

Traditionally, electronically searching for music, whether in collections of thousands (private collections) or millions of tracks (digital music resellers), is basically a database lookup task based on meta-data. For indexing a collection, existing music retrieval systems make use of arbitrarily assigned and subjective meta-information like genre or style in combination with objective meta-data like artist name, album name, track name, record label, or year of release.