One Million... Song Dataset Challenge [Think "Data geek music listening analysis and prediction challenge"]

kaggle - Million Song Dataset Challenge

"The Million Song Dataset Challenge aims at being the best possible offline evaluation of a music recommendation system. Any type of algorithm can be used: collaborative filtering, content-based methods, web crawling, even human oracles!* By relying on the Million Song Dataset, the data for the competition is completely open: almost everything is known and possibly available.

What is the task in a few words? You have: 1) the full listening history for 1M users, 2) half of the listening history for 110K users (10K validation set, 100K test set), and you must predict the missing half. How much easier can it get?

The most straightforward approach to this task is pure collaborative filtering, but remember that there is a wealth of information available to you through the Million Song Dataset. Go ahead, explore! If you have questions, we recommend that you consult the MSD Mailing List.

Ready to start recommending? Read through our Getting Started tutorial..."

Million Song Dataset

"The Million Song Dataset is a freely-available collection of audio features and metadata for a million contemporary popular music tracks.

Its purposes are:

• To encourage research on algorithms that scale to commercial sizes
• To provide a reference dataset for evaluating research
• As a shortcut alternative to creating a large dataset with APIs (e.g. The Echo Nest's)
• To help new researchers get started in the MIR field

The core of the dataset is the feature analysis and metadata for one million songs, provided by The Echo Nest. The dataset does not include any audio, only the derived features. Note, however, that sample audio can be fetched from services like 7digital, using code we provide.

The Million Song Dataset is also a cluster of complementary datasets contributed by the community:

• SecondHandSongs dataset -> cover songs
• musiXmatch dataset -> lyrics
• Last.fm dataset -> song-level tags and similarity
• Taste Profile subset -> user data

The Million Song Dataset started as a collaborative project between The Echo Nest and LabROSA. It was supported in part by the NSF.

..."

I love this part from the MSD Getting Started section;

To start your own experiments, you can download the entire dataset (280 GB). We also provide a subset of 10,000 songs (1%, 1.8 GB compressed) for a quick taste.

280GB. Now that's a dataset.

Anyway...

I thought the MSD Challenge interesting and something that called out to my inner data geek.

(via KDnuggets Home - Million Song Dataset Challenge)