An automated system for analyzing music usage and metadata exchange on digital music services

The study investigated music usage on several online services over a period of sixteen months with the purpose of identifying listening behaviours among fans and differences between music genres online. The research was conducted with the Music Intelligence Mashup System, a platform for automatically collecting data from online services. The study identifies large discrepancies between genres as well as a number of interesting findings on listening behaviours for particular artists. The paper also presents several suggestions for how the music industry could develop new business models in the digital environment