MusicWeb: Music Discovery with Open Linked Semantic Metadata

This paper presents MusicWeb, a novel platform for music discovery by linking music artists within a web-based application. MusicWeb provides a browsing experience using connections that are either extra-musical or tangential to music, such as the artists' political affiliation or social influence, or intra-musical, such as the artists' main instrument or most favoured musical key. The platform integrates open linked semantic metadata from various Semantic Web, music recommendation and social media data sources. Artists are linked by various commonalities such as style, geographical location, instrumentation, record label as well as more obscure categories, for instance, artists who have received the same award, have shared the same fate, or belonged to the same organisation. These connections are further enhanced by thematic analysis of journal articles, blog posts and content-based similarity measures focussing on high level musical categories.