Large-Scale Analysis of Group-Specific Music Genre Taste from Collaborative Tags

In this paper, we describe the LFM-1b User Genre Profile dataset. It provides detailed information on musical genre preferences for more than 120,000 listeners and links to the LFM-1b dataset. We created the dataset by exploiting social tags, indexing them using two genre term sets, and aggregating the resulting annotated listening events on the user level. We foresee several applications of the dataset in music retrieval and recommendation tasks, among others to build and evaluate decent user models, to alleviate cold-start situations in music recommender systems, and to increase their performance using the additional abstraction layer of genre. We further present results of statistical analyses of the dataset, regarding genre preferences and their consistencies. We do so for the entire user population and for user groups defined by demographic similarities. Moreover, we report interesting insights about correlations between musical preferences on the genre level.