Dance Hit Song Prediction

© 2014, © 2014 Taylor & Francis. Record companies invest billions of dollars in new talent around the globe each year. Gaining insight into what actually makes a hit song would provide tremendous benefits for the music industry. In this research we tackle this question by focussing on the dance hit song classification problem. A database of dance hit songs from 1985 until 2013 is built, including basic musical features, as well as more advanced features that capture a temporal aspect. A number of different classifiers are used to build and test dance hit prediction models. The resulting best model has a good performance when predicting whether a song is a ‘top 10’ dance hit versus a lower listed position.This research has been partially supported by the Interuniversity Attraction Poles (IUAP) Programme initiated by the Belgian Science Policy Office (COMEX project)