A Web Platform to Extract and Investigate Music Genre Labels in Spotify

The growing use of music streaming platforms is changing the listening taste and habits of users. While the problem of defining music genres and classifying compositions accordingly has been widely debated in musicology, little attention has been paid to the redefinition of the concept of genre in the light of new distribution models and technological devices. In this paper, we first describe SpotiGeM, an interdisciplinary project involving musicology, sociology, and IT experts, aiming to understand the effects of streaming platforms in general, and Spotify in particular, on the concept of genre. After defining the background, we focus on the Web platform implemented and publicly released to support such research. We list the main findings that emerge from use cases and scenarios. We also propose some directions to generalize the project's outcomes, showing that the Web platform can be employed also to investigate other aspects of individual music consumption, artistic processes, and distribution models.