KDD-Cup 2011:

Recommending Music Items based on the Yahoo! Music Dataset

Learn the rhythm, predict the musical scores

People have been fascinated by music since the dawn of humanity. A wide variety of music genres and styles has evolved, reflecting diversity in personalities, cultures and age groups. It comes as no surprise that human tastes in music are remarkably diverse, as nicely exhibited by the famous quotation: "We don't like their sound, and guitar music is on the way out" (Decca Recording Co. rejecting the Beatles, 1962).

Yahoo! Music has amassed billions of user ratings for musical pieces. When properly analyzed, the raw ratings encode information on how songs are grouped, which hidden patterns link various albums, which artists complement each other, and above all, which songs users would like to listen to.

Such an exciting analysis introduces new scientific challenges. The KDD Cup contest releases over 300 million ratings performed by over 1 million anonymized users. The ratings are given to different types of items-songs, albums, artists, genres-all tied together within a known taxonomy.