How deep can we dive into music with data science?
ANOUK DYUSSEMBAYEVA A SEPTEMBER, 13 / 2019
Let's take a look at Hollywood. Instead of guessing a movie's box office revenue, the world's blockbuster powerhouse figured AI would do a better job.
Photo by Mathew Schwartz on Unsplash
ScriptBook — a tool that approximates box office revenue through screenplay analysis — uses machine learning to process unstructured data. In other words, the startup analyses the movie's screenplay and its visual story. ScriptBook's predicted The Passenger to earn $118 million. How much did it actually make? Around $118 million.
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As the film industry and the world of music are tightly intertwined, can we do the same for music?
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Back in April, I tried doing a data science project which would predict a song's place in the charts, but it was very, very subjective. As far as my research went, I didn't find a single startup that was doing at least something along those lines — only an article on Medium, where the writer was predicting whether the song is hit or not.
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Of course, based on those results, you could apply this algorithm to songs that are just being released. But while a №1 song is more likely to bring more revenue that a song placed below the top 100, the song's chart position does NOT equal high revenue.
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What is more interesting is that the music streaming juggernauts — Spotify, Pandora, Apple Music, SoundCloud — are not doing anything about this.
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Spotify could potentially predict the revenue of their artists' songs, and pinpoint their weak areas. At the same time, SoundCloud can create a new feature where they help emerging young musicians get more recognition by implementing AI algorithms.
⠀
As the film industry and the world of music are tightly intertwined, can we do the same for music?
⠀
Back in April, I tried doing a data science project which would predict a song's place in the charts, but it was very, very subjective. As far as my research went, I didn't find a single startup that was doing at least something along those lines — only an article on Medium, where the writer was predicting whether the song is hit or not.
⠀
Of course, based on those results, you could apply this algorithm to songs that are just being released. But while a №1 song is more likely to bring more revenue that a song placed below the top 100, the song's chart position does NOT equal high revenue.
⠀
What is more interesting is that the music streaming juggernauts — Spotify, Pandora, Apple Music, SoundCloud — are not doing anything about this.
⠀
Spotify could potentially predict the revenue of their artists' songs, and pinpoint their weak areas. At the same time, SoundCloud can create a new feature where they help emerging young musicians get more recognition by implementing AI algorithms.
