Exploring Customer Reviews for Music Genre Classification and Evolutionary Studies

In this paper, we explore a large multimodal dataset of about 65k albums constructed from a combination of Amazon customer reviews, MusicBrainz metadata and AcousticBrainz audio descriptors. Review texts are further enriched with named entity disambiguation along with polarity information derived from an aspect-based sentiment analysis framework. This dataset constitutes the cornerstone of two main contributions: First, we perform experiments on music genre classification, exploring a variety of feature types, including semantic, sentimental and acoustic features. These experiments show that modeling semantic information contributes to outperforming strong bag-of-words baselines. Second, we provide a diachronic study of the criticism of music genres via a quantitative analysis of the polarity associated to musical aspects over time. Our analysis hints at a potential correlation between key cultural and geopolitical events and the language and evolving sentiments found in music reviews.