Uncovering Affinity of Artists to Multiple Genres from Social Behaviour Data

In organisation schemes, musical artists are commonly identified with a unique ‘genre’ label attached, even when they have affinity to multiple genres. To uncover this hidden cultural awareness about multi-genre affinity, we present a new model based on the analysis of the way in which a community of users organise artists and genres in playlists. Our work is based on a novel dataset that we have elaborated identifying the co-occurrences of artists in the playlists shared by the members of a popular Web-based community, and that is made publicly available. The analysis defines an automatic social-based method to uncover relationships between artists and genres, and introduces a series of novel concepts that characterises artists and genres in a richer way than a unique ‘genre’ label would do.