From the Beatles to Taylor Swift, everyone's music is available digitally now. People used to think technology is killing the music industry, but it's technology which is reviving it. So for musicians who are also interested in programming, data science is one way to get onboard with the idea. Spotify and Pandora know just the right track to play next thanks to data science. Wondering which song did well and why, look no further, the answer is in data science.
Pandora was perhaps the frontrunner of combining the two when it started the 'Music Genome Project' way back in 1999 before terms like Big Data even existed. The project considers songs as datasets and analyzes each song using up to 450 distinct musical characteristics or “genes”. A person – a trained music analyst with an actual degree in music – and automated algorithms comb through the song and classify it as Pop/Rock, Hip-Hop/Electronica, Jazz, World Music, and Classical. Decoding the “genes” of the song helps Pandora find the similarities and then successfully predict what a user might like listening to next.
