Eur. Phys. J. B 50, 183-188 (2006)
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjb/e2006-00115-0

On the genre-fication of music: a percolation approach

SUPRATECS, Université de Liège, B5 Sart-Tilman, 4000 Liège, Belgium

Corresponding authors: ^a Renaud.Lambiotte@ulg.ac.be - ^b Marcel.Ausloos@ulg.ac.be

Received: 13 October 2005
Revised: 23 November 2005
Published online: 12 April 2006

Abstract

We analyze web-downloaded data on people sharing their music library. By attributing to each music group usual music genres (Rock, Pop ...), and analysing correlations between music groups of different genres with percolation-idea based methods, we probe the reality of these subdivisions and construct a music genre cartography, with a tree representation. We also discuss an alternative objective way to classify music, that is based on the complex structure of the groups audience. Finally, a link is drawn with the theory of hidden variables in complex networks.