Ranking music data by relevance and importance

Due to the rapidly increasing availability of audio files on the Web, it is relevant to augment search engines with advanced audio search functionality. In this context, the ranking of the retrieved music is an important issue. This paper proposes a music ranking method capable of flexibly fusing the music based on its relevance and importance. The fusion is controlled by a single parameter, which can be intuitively tuned by the user. The notion of authoritative music among relevant music is introduced, and social media mined from the Web is used in an innovative manner to determine both the relevance and importance of music. The proposed method may support users with diverse needs when searching for music.